Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 282 - Portrait of the Artist - John Buridan.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, Portrait of the Artist, John Burridden. Can a medieval philosopher be fashionable? We'll probably never see Hildegard of Bingen's music feature in the pop charts or teenagers ensuring that "#HenryofGhent trends on Twitter." But even among scholars of medieval philosophy, there are trends and fashions. As I've mentioned before, Thomas Aquinas is nowadays like a television sitcom that has been running for too many seasons, still beloved but overly familiar. Who then is the hipster's scholastic philosopher? Actually, Henry of Ghent is a candidate and certainly Scodas has received a lot of attention in recent scholarship. But as far as I can tell, the most fashionable choice these days is John Burridden. The last few episodes have already given a sense of why this should be. His name has come up numerous times as we've looked at 14th century developments in logic and physics. But there's more than his historical importance at play here. Burridden is a perfect match for the concerns of today's analytic philosophers, who for better or worse are today's arbiters of what counts as cool in the history of philosophy. Burridden shares their technical virtuosity, their enthusiasm for empirical science, and equal impatience for extravagant metaphysics. And perhaps most importantly, his philosophy seems to be resolutely non-religious. Obviously, Burridden was no atheist, and theological issues inevitably come up in his works from time to time. Usually though, he mentions such issues simply to explain that they are above his pay grade, because he is not a theologian but a master of arts. As far as we know, Burridden never even attempted to get a higher degree, and remained a teacher in the arts faculty in Paris for about 40 years, from the 1320s until his death around 1361. In today's terms, this would be a bit like working as a high school teacher instead of becoming a university professor. Now, I'm a university professor who has nothing but admiration for high school teachers, I'm sure I couldn't do that job. But still, one might wonder whether Burridden lacked ambition or perhaps fell foul of some sort of political intrigue? Apparently not the latter, he was supported with numerous stipends during his time in Paris. Rather, it seems that the faculty of arts suited Burridden's interests, which lay with the study of logic and the other sciences covered by Aristotle like physics and ethics. At one point, he asks why the arts faculty is lower than those of theology, medicine, or law. His answer is a pointed one, the arts faculty has less money, but it studies more fundamental things, since logic and physics provide the principles for the higher disciplines. Because Burridden did not become a theologian, we have no lectures from him on the sentences of Peter Lombard, as we do for other major late medieval thinkers like Scotus and Occam. But there's plenty to read nonetheless, starting with numerous commentaries on Aristotle, including the physics and ethics, as well as all the logical treatises. These systematic accounts of Aristotle were extremely influential in subsequent generations, not only in Paris, but also at the new universities that emerged in central and eastern Europe, something we'll look at in a later episode. Equally important was the work that must count as Burridden's greatest achievement, the massive Summuli De Dialectica, or Compendium of Dialectic. A substantial reworking and expansion of an earlier logical compendium written by Peter of Spain about a century earlier, Burridden's Summuli would become a standard textbook of logic in the medieval university. It epitomizes what would come to be called the Via Moderna, the nominalist approach to logic and philosophy as a whole. For Burridden's young students, studying logic was probably like being made to eat their vegetables. For Burridden himself though, logic is a nourishing meal in itself, served in nine courses. This is the number of treatises in his Summuli devoted to the various branches of logic we've already discussed, like category theory, supposition theory, consequences, demonstrations, sophisms, and so on. For Burridden, logic as a whole is a practically oriented discipline with two aspects. First, there is what he calls theoretical logic from which we learn how to put together arguments in principle. Second, there is applied logic where logic is actually being deployed to argue for a given conclusion. So the logic student is acquiring a skill that will serve him in good stead no matter what kind of discourse he may want to interpret or produce. In keeping with this practical conception of logic, Burridden is keenly interested in the way language is actually used in real texts and arguments. It's in part on this basis that he rejects the approach of these speculative grammarians who had dominated this subject a couple of generations before and were still active in his day. It's futile to infer the function of a word from its grammatical form, he thinks, because natural languages just don't work that way. Burridden gives the nice example of verbs that are grammatically active but passive in meaning, like to receive. One response might be to purify natural language, working with an ideal version of Latin free of such unfortunate deviations from true logical form. This is not Burridden's way, and for good reason. He thinks that language is thoroughly conventional with meaning determined by the intentions of language users. He defends this picture of language in a number of ways. One of them more spectacular is a thought experiment. Suppose he says that there were a cataclysm in which our language is entirely lost. A new language might then arise in which the word donkey is used to refer to animals in general. In this situation, probably the least frightening post-apocalyptic scenario ever envisioned, it would be true to say, a human is a donkey, because the word donkey would mean what the word animal means now. Burridden also considers more realistic cases as when language is used metaphorically or ironically. If you want to hear terms being used to supposit in an unusual way, just hang out with teenagers. This is not to say that language is a free-for-all, where every term is given its meaning anew on each occasion of use. Normally, when we say donkey, we are referring to donkeys, and this normal or proper use needs to be explained somehow. Burridden's suggestion is a case where his ideas resonate with modern-day proposals. Like some philosophers of language nowadays, he thinks that words initially receive their meaning in a kind of baptism, where a word is initially imposed on a certain thing. The clearest case would be giving a proper name to an individual, as parents do when a baby is born. Even in this case, meaning is set by the intentions of language users, in this case the parents. To this extent, the assignment of a word's primary meaning is like deviant cases, as when a teenager is asked how she is doing and says, fine. Here too, the teenager's intention determines the word's meaning, namely that it is none of your business. Burridden here avails himself of Occam's idea that the same mental concepts can be expressed in different conventional signs. In that example of the language apocalypse, he says that the word donkey would come to represent the same thing at the mental level that the word animal does now. While this does sound very much like Occam, Burridden is less inclined to think of concepts as a language, properly speaking. For him, language is thoroughly conventional, whereas our minds latch onto things in the world via a natural process of concept formation. Burridden's explanation of how this occurs is thoroughly nominalistic. As he puts it, whatever exists outside the soul does so in reality as an individual that is distinct from all else. Our access to those things outside the soul is through sensation of individual things, which is why it makes sense to speak of Burridden as an empiricist. Once you have encountered individual donkeys, your mind can entertain a singular concept of each specific donkey and also form a universal concept of donkeys in general. It may seem that the nominalist's main problem is to account for the latter possibility. If there are no real universals, then how do we form universal concepts? But Burridden actually thinks this is quite straightforward. Individual donkeys obviously resemble one another, the long ears, the big dark eyes, the rich and distinctive scent. To form a notion of donkeys, we simply abstract these shared features, ignoring the properties that belong to only one donkey, like your own donkey's name, its location in your barn, or its tendency to step on your foot. A realist like Walter Burley would of course insist that the similarity between donkeys is the result of their having a real common nature. Burridden dismisses this idea though. If mere likeness is enough to justify positing a common nature, then such natures will proliferate uncontrollably. Suppose your donkey does step on your foot. In the moment it does so, it becomes like everything else that steps on anyone's foot. But surely this is not in virtue of some real common nature. He, Burridden, not the donkey, finds it somewhat more puzzling how we can have singular concepts. This is because we are not completely reliable in re-identifying individual things. If I snuck into your barn and replace your donkey with mine, you might not notice it until the donkey failed to step on your foot all the time. Or you might run into my identical twin brother Glenn and apply your concept of me to him, telling him how much you like his philosophy podcast. He gets that all the time. As far as I know, Burridden didn't have a twin brother, but he gives an equally compelling example. Suppose you are at sea and fall asleep. When you wake up, you will not be able to see that the ship has drifted because you cannot tell one part of the water from another. In light of this, Burridden thinks that a singular concept can only ever be tied to an individual because we are actually sensing that individual. As he puts it, the thing must be in the prospect of the cognizing person. This means that if you have not had an individual be in your physical presence, you can only ever grasp them under a description that could in theory apply to other individuals. It's only in this weaker sense that we have a singular concept of Burridden, for example, since none of us have ever met him. A realist like Walter Burley would of course find this whole account inadequate. And here's one reason why. Burridden has said that we grasp things universally simply by focusing on features found in many individuals. Outside the soul, it is only the individuals that are real. But in that case, can't we just divide up the world however we like? Instead of contrasting donkeys and humans, we could contrast those creatures that step on people's feet with those that don't. The former may be a more useful kind of classification, but it is no more rooted in the common natures of things because things have no real common natures. Doesn't this undermine Aristotelian science? According to Aristotle, a proper demonstration that yields true understanding must be universal in scope and must also get at essential properties. How can we retain this idea if we accept that our universal concepts are just based on any old likenesses? Burridden expert Gyula Klima has taken up this problem and contrasted realist essentialism with what he calls predicate essentialism. He explains that for Burridden, an essential predicate will be a feature that things must have in order to keep existing. Thus all donkeys need to have their predicates living and non-rational if they are to remain the same individuals that they are now. By contrast, stepping on someone's foot is a property that a given donkey can have and then lose, much to the relief of its victim. This is why we will never encounter a donkey that is not alive or that is rational, whereas we can encounter donkeys that are not stepping on anyone's foot. Hence the universality of a statement in Aristotelian science, such as all donkeys are alive. In Burridden's technical terms, this is a matter of ampliation. By speaking of all donkeys, we ampliate the word donkey so that it refers to every individual donkey that exists now, that ever has existed or ever will exist. Every one of these donkeys is alive and non-rational and must remain so if it is to avoid being destroyed. For Burridden, this is all we mean by the contrast between essential and accidental predicates, and it is enough to suit the requirements set down in Aristotle's philosophy of science. All this talk of donkeys will probably put you in mind of the most famous idea ascribed to Burridden. Where Occam had a razor, Burridden had an ass. He is famous for devising the example of a hungry donkey or ass that is presented with two equally tempting bales of hay. Would the donkey be able to choose arbitrarily between the two bales, or just stand there starving to death? Obviously, the latter answer is, well, asinine. Surely the donkey would indeed just choose some hay and start eating. But how is this possible? It would seem, after all, that we choose to do one thing rather than another precisely because we judge it to be preferable. In the case of the donkey, this explanation is not available, neither bale of hay can be preferred to the other, yet choice seems to occur nonetheless. It's unfortunate that Burridden is so famous for having invented this intriguing puzzle, because in fact he didn't. For one thing, it was invented quite a bit earlier by the Muslim theologian Al-Ghazali. Admittedly, his discussion of the problem is donkey-free, and instead asks us to imagine a human choosing between two equally appealing dates. But more importantly, the donkey example actually never appears in Burridden's writings. It was used by later authors when they discussed his position on free will. Let's then take a look at what Burridden does say about human freedom. He tends to break with the voluntarism of Scotus and Occam, returning to a more intellectualist position like that we found in Aquinas. According to this position, choice is simply the will's execution of a judgment reached by the intellect. That seems true to our experience of making decisions, where we do usually choose what seems, upon reflection, to be the best course of action. Yet it seems that sometimes the will fails to follow the dictates of reason. Or does it? Burridden thinks that it can, but only in a very limited way. One cannot simply reject one's own overall best judgment about what to do and do something different. When your will seems to be overwhelming your capacity for judgment, it is actually that capacity for judgment that is causing the problem. Suppose that, despite being an animal lover, you give into anger and beat your donkey because it steps on your foot. Here your judgment that it would be good to seek revenge has temporarily overwhelmed your general conviction that animals should be treated with kindness. But Burridden does make an important exception. The will can defer following reason in cases where the situation seems uncertain. Suppose you see a succulent apple on a shelf. You are hungry and judge that it would be good to eat the apple. But you might wait before eating it just in case. Perhaps the apple has a worm in it. Perhaps it is really a ceramic apple that would break your teeth. Perhaps some other more tempting food will come along soon. Perhaps your donkey will be hungry and your donkey loves apples. You needn't have one specific belief that undermines the judgment in favor of eating an apple. Indeed, if you did that would be a case where reason judges that the apple should not be eaten. Rather, you hold off because your will is adopting a cautious wait-and-see attitude. The rational judgment is not rejected, but filed under things to be done later when the time seems right. The will might also do this when the thing that seems best to the intellect is particularly daunting and difficult. So now we can see why the donkey and the bales of hay would be a puzzle worth putting to Burridden or even a mockery of his position. Put in that situation, would the donkey just defer acting indefinitely? Presumably his answer would be that if donkeys had reason and free choice, and in fact he thinks they don't, then the donkey would simply judge that it should pick one bale of hay at random and start eating. Nothing in Burridden's view would seem to foreclose this rather banal response. Burridden's treatment of freedom is unusual in another respect. He feels the need to respond to skeptical worries about whether we are indeed capable of free choice. Denying this would, he thinks, be pernicious in religious, scientific, and moral terms. He also considers it simply evident from experience that we do make choices all the time. Nonetheless, Burridden admits it is not possible to prove that we are free. Sometimes medieval thinkers say that a certain proposition is unprovable precisely because it is so obvious. As Aristotle observed, demonstrations should use more obvious or better-known premises to establish less obvious conclusions. It is at best pointless and at worst methodologically incoherent to try to prove something blindingly obvious. But that doesn't seem to be quite what Burridden means here. Though he considers it evident that we are free, he also considers this an exalted topic of inquiry that may elude our capacity for scientific demonstration. This slightly uncomfortable combination, confidence in what seems evident to us, coupled with an awareness of the fallibility of human reasoning, also characterizes Burridden's response to his fellow Parisian Nicholas of Autrecourt. Nicholas mounts a case for skepticism that is unprecedented in the medieval period for both its sophistication and its potentially far-reaching implications. Answering this challenge, Burridden decides to move the epistemological goalposts. He argues that we can consider ourselves to be capable of certain knowledge so long as we have a properly modest understanding of what certainty involves. As we'll see, Burridden's vocation as an arts master will be relevant here. Confronted with skeptical arguments that appeal to God's power to deceive us and confound our expectations, he simply says that such worries are not his concern. Sure, God can perform miracles, but this is a matter for theologians to sort out. Could this really be an adequate response to the skeptic? We'll find out in a couple of episodes when we look at the clash between John Burridden and Nicholas of Autrecourt. First, though, we're going to rely on something that is far more certain, the expertise of Jack Zupko. He's a leading scholar of Burridden's thought who will join me for an interview about this most fashionable of 14th century scholastics next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.