Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 238 - Binding Arbitration - Robert Kilwardby.txt

 Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the Philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. online at www.historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode, Binding Arbitration, Robert Kilwardby. As a wise man once said, the solution to a problem with Aristotle is always more Aristotle. Okay, it wasn't actually a wise man, it was me, in episode 159, talking about Maimonides' ethics. But as a philosopher, I am at least striving to be wise, and it's only to be expected that Maimonides and any other medieval philosopher would strive to answer objections to Aristotelian philosophy by using the resources of that philosophy. Of course, fighting fire with fire is a high-risk strategy, and in the case of Maimonides, it led to the burning of his works. Again, we might think this was only to be expected. Just as philosophers of the Middle Ages were committed Aristotelians, so there were medieval critics who wanted to commit the works of philosophers to the flames. In addition to the burning of Maimonides' writings, carried out by Christian authorities at the behest of Jews, there were decrees by the Christian church condemning certain philosophical doctrines as unacceptable. Most famous is a condemnation laid down by the Bishop of Paris in 1277, which will be the topic of a future episode. But in the very same month, a similar edict was made at the University of Oxford by Robert Kilwardby, the Archbishop of Canterbury. On this basis alone, it seems easy to fit Kilwardby into our pattern. In an age when philosophers chafed against and were constrained by anti-philosophical authorities, Kilwardby was on the side of the anti-philosophers. He would represent the latest attempt to stem the Aristotelian tide that had been rising throughout the 13th century in hopes of preserving a more traditional Augustinian approach. On this telling, he was the Augustinian foil to his fellow Dominican Thomas Aquinas, a thoroughgoing Aristotelian who may even have been one of the prime targets of Kilwardby's active censorship in Oxford. Kilwardby would thus be an intellectual ally of a man like the Franciscan theologian Peter Olivey, whom we saw sneering at his contemporaries for seeing Aristotle as the god of this age, and instead favouring the opinions of Augustine as Olivey understood them. But if scholastic philosophy teaches us anything, it's that we should question stark oppositions and seek to draw our distinctions more finely. So it is here. Kilwardby spent decades as a student and master in both Paris and Oxford before becoming Archbishop of Canterbury in 1272. He wrote works of Aristotelian logic, natural philosophy, and ethics, writings that would influence Albert the Great, who was certainly no one's idea of an anti-philosopher. If we want to understand Kilwardby, it's far better to start with this extensive body of writings than with his decision to prohibit certain philosophical teachings at Oxford. In these writings, we do find Kilwardby saying that Augustine was, much more sublimely enlightened than Aristotle, especially in spiritual matters. But we also find that he is keen to establish agreement between these two great authorities insofar as he can, so that his own teachings emerge as creative compromises. Kilwardby's credentials as a faithful Aristotelian can be established easily enough by turning to his work in logic and grammar, which were no less fundamental for him than for other university schoolmen. Far from questioning Aristotle's teachings, he applies ideas taken from other areas of Aristotelian science to these arts of the trivium. In particular, he uses concepts from natural philosophy to explain language and philosophical arguments. His grammatical writings are based on the ancient linguistic theorist, Priscian, not Aristotle. Yet, Kilwardby explains the function of a verb by referring to Aristotle's ideas about emotion, while a noun in the nominative case stands for a substance that is undergoing or carrying out emotion. He is also at pains to present grammar as a science in the Aristotelian sense. This is no easy task, since Aristotelian sciences are supposed to be general or universal, whereas the study of grammar would seem to be specific to whatever language it is you are analyzing – one grammar for Latin, another for Greek or English. While Kilwardby is of course aware of the differences between languages, he nonetheless insists that there are some features common to all languages, for instance, that there are only four parts of speech that can be declined, namely nouns, verbs, pronouns, and participles. Thus, grammar has the requisite universality to be considered in Aristotelian science. More striking still is what he does with logic. Nowadays, we would ourselves decline to see strong links between logic and physics, but Kilwardby thinks it is useful to take the four-cause theory of Aristotle's natural philosophy and apply it to syllogistic arguments. The efficient cause of a syllogism is the person who forms it, and its final cause or purpose is of course to produce knowledge. Kilwardby also thinks of syllogisms as having a material and formal cause. Basically, the matter of a syllogism is the terms that appear in the premises, while the form is the way that the terms are arranged. Consider an everyday syllogism like the following explanation of why Hiawatha was unable to achieve her childhood dream. Here, the terms are giraffe, able to roller skate, and able to compete in roller derby, while the form of the argument is, no A is B, only B is C, therefore no A is C. All the elements that the medieval's called syncatogormatic features of the syllogism, such as negation or modifiers like necessarily and possibly, belong to the form and not the matter. Now this is quite interesting, because we also talk about logic being formal. So Kilwardby's view may seem to be a step towards the more abstract and even mathematical conception of logic that philosophers work with today. Kilwardby's contributions to philosophy of language and logic are also significant for a more basic reason—he got there before most of his contemporaries. He wrote the oldest commentary on Priscian's grammar that we can date, and was also one of the first to comment on the newly translated logical works by Aristotle. He did all this during his time at Paris, before joining the Dominicans in 1245 and returning to his native England, where he would turn his attention to more theological topics. In the 1250s, he was still working on problems within Aristotle's natural philosophy. He devoted one set of disputed questions from this period to the much debated topic of time, which we saw puzzling earlier 13th century thinkers like Richard Rufus and, well, a whole bunch of other guys whose names we don't know. Here we have a good opportunity to test Kilwardby's allegiance to Augustine, as opposed to Aristotle, since Augustine's Confessions is famous for proposing that time only exists in our minds and not in external reality. Kilwardby does cite this opinion, but can't bring himself to accept it. One reason for thinking that time is unreal would also apply to motion. Like time, motion exists only stretched across past, present, and future, yet the past no longer exists, while the future does not yet exist. It Kilwardby assumes that no one will want to say that motion is unreal, so neither should we say this of time. Instead, both motion and time should be thought of as successive entities, which exist precisely by coming into being and elapsing. Time relates to successive motion as its quantity, much as spatial extension is a quantity for bodies, with the significant difference that spatial quantity remains fixed, while temporal quantity is transient. So, if there is any mind-independent or subjective aspect of time, it is not the quantitative measure of motions out in the world. Instead, it would be our own measurements of time, which render it, as Kilwardby says, determinate by dividing it into minutes and hours. But even this is not presented as a way of saving Augustine's position. Instead, Kilwardby uses the point to explain Aristotle's claim that we know time by counting, or marking off, a motion. So far we're building up a picture of a man who seems no more likely to condemn Aristotelian philosophy than to join a roller derby team. But Kilwardby's actions in 1277 will become more explicable once we've talked about another area of his thought, his views on the soul. Like many of the other thinkers we've met from the 13th century, he accepted an apparently paradoxical idea first put forward by the Jewish thinker Ibn Gabirol, though Kilwardby never mentions him and may not even have known the ultimate source of the theory. The idea is that even spiritual beings like the soul have matter, only God is truly immaterial. Paradoxical though this sounds, one can give a powerful argument for it. Matter was one popular answer to the long-running question of what makes something an individual. Whereas the nature of giraffes is something held in common by Hiawatha, Harold, and all other giraffes, there's only one particular bit of matter that makes up Hiawatha, while Harold is made of another bit of matter. If it's matter that individuates things in its way, something that Kilwardby believed for at least part of his career, then spiritual things too must have matter. Otherwise, how could your soul and mine be distinct individuals? Kilwardby took this idea to be faithfully Augustinian, and even associated the tendency of matter to take on form with Augustine's talk of seminal reasons, an idea that Augustine had in turn borrowed from the Stoics. Still, when Kilwardby uses the idea to explain the human soul, his expertise in Aristotelian logic is on full display. In this logical system, there is no idea more fundamental than the relation of genus to species. The most general genus of things is substance, and this genus is divided, subdivided, and sub-subdivided into ever more specific classes, as when we say that there are bodily and spiritual substances, living bodily substances as opposed to inanimate ones, animals as opposed to plants, and humans as opposed to giraffes. We've already seen Kilwardby bringing together natural philosophy with logic, and he does so again here. He thinks of matter as having the potential or power to take on all these forms, from the most general form of substance down to the most specific form of rationality, which is distinctive of humans. So you have not just one, but many forms, one that makes you a substance, another that makes you a physical body, another that makes you a living being, another that makes you an animal, and finally the form that makes you a human. It may already be obvious what this has to do with the soul, especially since we've seen a very similar set of ideas in Peter Olivey. For him and for Kilwardby, the soul is not just one simple form. The lower psychological powers, the ones responsible for giving you life and the ability to move and engage in sensation, come as forms that are distinct from the rational soul, which is what makes you a human. And the soul in its entirety is nothing but the conjunction of all these powers. When humans are first forming as embryos, the powers are added sequentially. This is an idea we already saw in William of Auvergne, but with a crucial difference. For William, each form was effectively replaced or swallowed up when newer, more sophisticated forms arise in the fetus, something he compared to a brighter light engulfing a dimmer light. Kilwardby instead compares the process to a geometrical construction, where a triangle is added to a trapezoid to form a pentagon. But he has more to offer than just a change of metaphor, and gives both philosophical and theological arguments to show that the powers or forms in the soul remain distinct. Philosophically, it's clear to him that the many abilities we exercise as living beings, from digestion to thought, require numerous different powers, and not just one. Theologically, Kilwardby worries that if there is only a simple, rational soul in a human, then the human that was Christ could not in fact have been the incarnation of God, but only an immaterial divine spirit with a loose connection to a body. In holding that our soul consists of a plurality of forms or powers, Kilwardby flirts with the danger we noted when looking at Audevis. If this theory is correct, then won't the unity of my person be compromised? My rational soul will be associated with the lower parts of my being, but it will be a distinct entity that floats free of the rest. To avoid this, Kilwardby cites Augustine, the soul joins to the body in order to fulfill its desire for knowledge about all things. And unlike a giraffe who dreams of rolling around the rink, the soul can achieve its desire, thanks to what Kilwardby calls its unibility, that is, its innate tendency to form a unity with the body. But why does the soul need to be united to the body in order to have knowledge? Because Kilwardby is enough of an Aristotelian to think that most of our intellectual understanding depends upon the experience of the senses. In the contest between Augustinian theories of illumination and Aristotelian ideas of empirical science, Kilwardby predictably takes a conciliatory middle position. Knowledge of some things, like mathematical truths, the soul and God himself, is implanted within the soul from birth. But for everything else, we need to explore the world using sensation. And speaking of sensation, this topic is the occasion for yet another compromise theory. We saw that Peter Olivey accepted that the sense organs, such as the eyes, are affected by their surroundings, yet denied that the physical changes in these organs have any role in the soul's sensory awareness. Instead, the soul is aware of things by simply extending its attention to them. Olivey thus rejected views like that of Roger Bacon, according to which sensation occurs precisely when a representative species of a sense object is registered in the eyes. When Kilwardby comes to discuss sensation, he splits the difference. On the one hand, he agrees with Olivey that a mere bodily change cannot affect the soul. On the other hand, he thinks the sense organ must play a greater role than Olivey would allow, otherwise things would not need to be physically present in the right place, suitably illuminated and so on, if we are to see them. His idea is instead that when the image of a sense object is present in the organ, the soul can assimilate itself to that image. It does so by actively making a further image for itself, which is an image of the image in the sense organ. Suppose I am looking at Hiawatha, who was wistfully staring at a pair of roller skates she will never wear. An image of her is present in my eyes, but the mere reception of this image is not seeing. For me to see her is for my soul to fashion a further likeness of her, as Kilwardby puts it, in and from itself. Peter Olivey would be ready with an objection here, namely that if the image in the sense organ is being used as an intermediary in this way, then my soul is not actually perceiving Hiawatha, but rather an image of Hiawatha. But Kilwardby insists that, in grasping a suitably exact likeness of a thing, I am in fact perceiving that very thing. And perhaps he's right about this. If you were looking at a photograph of your mother, you probably wouldn't hesitate to say that you were seeing, or looking at, your mother. On this and other topics, Kilwardby presented himself as being like a good roller skater, expert in balancing acts. Where we would probably say that his theory of sensation is neither Aristotelian nor Augustinian, he insisted that it expose the hidden agreement between the two ancient authorities. Which brings us finally to the mystery of why this conciliatory man used the power of his office as Archbishop to prohibit philosophical ideas. The works I've been discussing were mostly written 20 years or more before the 1277 ban. So perhaps his views drifted towards intolerance as he aged and rose within the church hierarchy. We may hope for old age to bring wisdom, but often as not, it just brings grumpiness. But a look at the 30 theses Kilwardby actually prohibited tells a different story. About half of them concern issues in grammar and logic, but the most central issue was one that had long been of interest to Kilwardby, the unity of the soul. The masters of Oxford were forbidden to teach that in human embryos, the lower souls are extinguished when the higher soul arrives, or in general, that the powers of the soul are all explained by virtue of a single form. It's often been suspected that Kilwardby's target was none other than the recently deceased Thomas Aquinas. Yet Kilwardby's attempts to explain and justify his prohibition show that he actually didn't have Aquinas in mind. What Kilwardby wanted to stamp out was the idea that the soul is a single form, something that had been asserted by William of Aran and others such as John Blunt. Aquinas took an even more extreme view than them. He thought that a human is a composite of body and soul, and that this whole composite has only one form. Kilwardby later stated that this view was unknown to him when he laid down the prohibition, adding that he didn't really understand it. He had been arguing against people with the far more reasonable, yet still in his view false view, that humans have numerous forms, the single form that is the soul, plus some more forms that belong to the body. In other words, when Aquinas argued that a human has only one form in total, which determines the features and powers of both body and soul, he was adopting a stance so radical and unfamiliar that Kilwardby hadn't even thought to ban it. But perhaps we care less about who Kilwardby was trying to blacklist, and more about the black mark against his own name. After a career devoted to careful arbitration between Augustinian and Aristotelian teachings, Kilwardby sought to make that arbitration a binding one. In so doing, he unwittingly wrote his own epitaph. He has gone down in history as an enemy of Aristotelianism, alongside the Bishop of Paris, Stephen Tampier. But this is unfair, as we can see if we take note of the differences between the Oxford ban and the one in Paris. As Kilwardby himself stressed, he was only prohibiting the teaching of certain doctrines, not condemning them as heretical as was done in Paris. And unlike Bishop Tampier, Kilwardby was himself a philosopher. His ban came backed with rational as well as theological arguments. This was not an attempt to crush philosophical inquiry, but an attempt to stop masters from teaching their students things that were demonstrably false. Obviously, this isn't to praise or excuse Kilwardby's actions, just to say that it would be a mistake to conflate the situation in Oxford with that of Paris, or to reduce Kilwardby's whole career to the prohibition. The Oxford ban would be reasserted in 1284 by Bonaventure's student John Peckham, by which time Kilwardby had been dead for five years. The second time around, it was more obvious that Aquinas was a potential target, and the Dominicans rallied around him. In 1286, the Order gave an across-the-board approval for all Aquinas's teachings. He was thoroughly orthodox, the Dominicans were saying, and he was ours. It was one step in the process by which he ultimately became the most famous and institutionally approved of all medieval thinkers. But to really appreciate Thomas Aquinas's place in medieval philosophy, we need to put him in context, and that means, among other things, looking at his teacher, the greatest 13th century Dominican thinker other than Aquinas himself, Albert the Great. He'll be the subject of two upcoming episodes. First though, I want to dwell on a theme that has emerged from this look at Kilwardby. I mentioned that he applies the distinction between matter and form to syllogistic arguments. It's an idea with far-reaching implications for both the history and philosophy of logic. To find out why it matters so much, join me next time as I meet someone with good form in explaining medieval logic. Katerina de Töll, Novice. Here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.