Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 265 - Time of the Signs - the Fourteenth Century.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, Time of the Signs, the 14th Century. If asked to name my favorite century, I would probably go with the 20th, which gave us Buster Keaton, Stevie Wonder, and Reese's Peanut Butter Cups. Beat that 21st century. Most other historians of philosophy, being more serious-minded, would probably choose either the 4th century BC, the time of Plato and Aristotle, or the 17th century AD, which can boast Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Margaret Cavendish, to name just a few. Actually, as far as philosophy goes, that's probably just the right answer. Aficionados of medieval thought might, however, be tempted to go for the 13th century, when you had the rise of the universities, the recovery of Aristotle, Albert the Great, Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Scotus. It's a real embarrassment of riches. In comparison, the 14th century looks to be a plain old embarrassment. A popular book about the history of the period labels it as calamitous, and here's a two-word phrase that will probably tempt you to agree immediately, Black Death. On the philosophical front, it's one of those eras people tend to skip, going straight from high scholasticism to the Renaissance and Reformation, or indeed vaulting all the way to the aforementioned glories of the Enlightenment. But this is a big mistake. For one thing, you can't understand the philosophical developments of the Renaissance and Reformation without knowing what happened in the 14th century. Of course, you'd expect me to say this, without any gaps and all that, but it's particularly true in this case. The word Renaissance suggests a break with what came before, but in fact scholastic philosophy continued to flourish in the 15th and 16th centuries when we see the emergence of factions or schools following the lead of Scotus, Occam, and others. The name of Occam also reminds us that, historical influence aside, the 14th century did have its share of famous names. In the scholastic context, William of Occam and John Buridan are probably the best known figures. But specialists in medieval philosophy know that there are many others who deserve to be better known, like Peter Oriel, Gregory of Rimini, Adam Wodum, Walter Burley, Nicholas of Autrichor, and Nicole Oresme. It has to be said that these are mostly figures of the early or mid-14th century, though Oresme didn't die until 1382. Later in the century, after the Black Death and during the Hundred Years' War, fewer stars seemed to shine in the scholastic firmament. But there are exceptions, such as the controversial John Wycliffe, who died around the same time as Oresme and helped to set the agenda for 15th century thought. It would be another big mistake to think that 14th century philosophy is just the story of scholasticism. Here is a selective list of figures from this period who were active outside the university context and who we'll be covering in the episodes to come. Mariette Porrett, Dante Alighieri, Meister Eckhart, Johannes Thalle, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Julian of Norwich. Admittedly, none of these authors are primarily seen as philosophers. Dante and Chaucer are stars in a different firmament, being respectively the greatest figures in Italian and English medieval literature. It's easy to make a case for including Dante in our series, though. His Divine Comedy has much to say about philosophy, and he wrote two treatises on philosophical topics, the Convivio and On Monarchy. Chaucer, meanwhile, was interested in scholasticism and reflects on its ideas in several of his poetic works. As for Mariette, Eckhart, Thalle, and Julian, they are all more usually categorized as mystics. But by this stage, you should be comfortable with the idea that the line between philosophy and mysticism is, at best, a blurry one. We'll be seeing that 14th century mystical texts dealt with a range of issues in epistemology, metaphysics, and ethics, easily warranting their inclusion in our story. That's just a thumbnail sketch of what happened in the history of philosophy during the 1300s. Before getting into more detail, let's have a quick look at the wider historical context. As I've already mentioned, it was a rough century. Even aside from the Black Death, which struck around 1350 and reduced populations across Europe by something like one-third, there were plenty of other disasters to contend with. It seems that population growth had already slowed towards the end of the 13th century, and terrible weather in 1315 and 1316 caused harvests to fail with widespread famine the inevitable result. Average temperatures also cooled in the so-called Little Ice Age, following a warming period that had prevailed in Europe in the previous centuries. While the people suffered, their leaders squabbled. As we'll see, a question that much occupied political thinkers of the time was the relative authority of church and state. Positions were adopted all along the spectrum here, with Aquinas's disciple Giles of Rome making a strong case for the supremacy of the pope, and Marsilius of Padua going just as far in a secularist direction. This was not just an abstract theoretical dispute, but a reaction to current events. We'll see this in Dante too. He scatters political observations, predictions, and outright character assassinations throughout his Divine Comedy, reserving a special place in hell, quite literally, for Pope Boniface VIII. The papacy in this period was embattled, and not just because of insolent Italian vernacular poets. Early in the century, King Philip IV of France came into conflict with this same pope, Boniface VIII, who threatened him with excommunication. Philip had the pope taken prisoner, and the pontiff died soon after. His immediate successors fell under the influence of the French crown, one symptom being the relocation of the pope's residence to Avignon. It would remain there for more than 70 years, a matter of annoyance to Italians, who expressed their dismay by complaining of the debauchery of the papal court. Petrarch called it the sewer of the world. To the modern year, the name Avignon immediately conjures up the schism within the church, with one pope there and another in Rome. This situation began in 1378 and persisted into the 15th century. Worldly rulers too were causing their fair share of mischief. Particularly important for our story is the Hundred Years' War between France and England, since Paris and Oxford are the main centres for scholastic philosophy in this period. This so-called war was more a matter of intermittent hostility, beginning in 1337 when Edward III of England entered into conflict with Philip VI of France over the possession of Gascony. The English made significant advances, culminating in the capture of the French king John and his son at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356. But the French clawed back territory under Charles V, who ruled until 1380. All of this naturally made it more difficult for ideas and scholars to pass freely between the English and French spheres. But already earlier in the century, we see a dramatic reduction in the number of Englishmen being trained in Paris. The war between the two states would at most have perpetuated the autonomy of Oxford from Paris without entirely preventing schoolmen at one university from following developments at the other. This is one of the biggest changes in the university culture of the period. Over the previous hundred years, Paris had been the centre of the scholastic world. But modern-day historians usually see Paris as surrendering its leading role to Oxford in the 14th century. In his excellent book on the topic, William Cordenay says that, We shouldn't exaggerate here though. Parisian scholars continued to do sophisticated and innovative work. In a later episode about God's knowledge of the future, the Parisian theologians Peter Auriol and Gregory of Rimini will feature prominently. Something else to bear in mind is that scholasticism could, and did, develop outside of Oxford and Paris. The famous William of Ockham is a good example. Though he did study theology at Oxford, his early education and the high point of his writing career were both at the Franciscan house in London. For reasons we'll get into later, he spent his final years at Avignon and then Munich. Scholasticism itself followed Ockham's example by moving all over Europe. Marsilius of Ingin, who as it happens also followed Ockham on philosophical matters, went from Paris to Heidelberg late in the century. By the time the 1300s draw to a close, scholasticism will be a pan-European phenomenon, with places like Prague and Padua giving the older universities a run for their money. Not everyone was enthusiastic about the ideas being put forward by Ockham and others. Wycliffe, whose ideas would be influential at Prague, decried the men he called the doctors of signs, and sneered at the sort of logical exercises that, he said, amused the university scholars at Christmas. Why doctors of signs? Well, this is a reference to a philosophical teaching that became dominant in the first half of the century concerning the problem of universals. We know from episode 263 that Scodas defended a moderate realism about common natures. True universals are only in the mind, he said, yet these mental generalizations are grounded in real natures out in the world. So an individual giraffe like Hiawatha has a real giraffe nature which is shared with other giraffes. Scodas took great pains to distinguish his own position from the more extreme realism he associated with Platonism, but that did not stop Ockham and others from attacking his view. For Ockham, and then a whole range of other 14th century thinkers such as Buridan and Marsilius of Ingin, a common name is nothing but a sign that stands for a range of individuals out in the world. There is no shared giraffe nature, never mind a platonic form of giraffes. The name giraffe simply signifies all the particular giraffes. We've met this sort of attitude before, back in the 12th century with the work of Peter Abelard. We called his position nominalist, a word that is also routinely applied to Ockham, Buridan, and their philosophical allies. But we need to be careful here. For one thing, they did not call themselves nominalists. This title was applied to them in retrospect. For another thing, nominalism has come to be used for a whole collection of philosophical theses that hang together nicely and seem to be characteristic of much 14th century thought. Like a police artist helping to solve a crime at a beauty parlor, let me offer you another thumbnail sketch. Begin with the nominalist denial of real common natures. From this we can see that he is raising a doubt as to whether our ideas mirror reality the way that Scodas and others assumed. Yes, we have ideas that we apply to many things in common, but this is only a feature of our mental life and language. There is nothing common or shared out there in reality. From here, you could worry that other aspects of our thought may be misleading or fail to capture reality fully. You could also start to question philosophical science itself, at least as Aristotle understood it. In the Aristotelian tradition, scientific judgments are thought to be universal in scope and to get hold of necessary truths about nature. But now, we're being told that there is nothing universal in nature. And the nominalist also tends to doubt that anything in nature is really necessary. This is because, while the nominalist disagrees with Scodas about the common features of things, he is ready to make common cause with Scodas's voluntarism. Scodas had shown how God's absolute freedom could be understood as the power to choose between mutually exclusive alternatives. As we saw in episode 261, God has an absolute power to do anything that can be done, that is, anything that isn't self-contradictory. Taking this idea seriously, the nominalist concludes that the whole created world is fundamentally contingent. It could have been otherwise, because God could have created a very different universe. The upshot is a double assault on the confident rationalism of Aristotelian philosophy. Though reason can still rule out some things as impossible—there can be no round squares or dry water—the scope of God's freedom means that all things in our world could have been different, even radically different. Furthermore, the way we speak and think about those things might be quite misleading, as when we grasp a universe of individuals by means of universal terms and concepts. Some pretty radical thoughts are lurking here. If our mind and language do not match the structure of the world, why not give in to a thoroughgoing skepticism? Though we'll see hints in that direction in the 14th century, more common will be a less radical tendency simply to restrict the scope of what reason can achieve. In theology, faith and revelation are on hand to fill the gap, leading to a less rationalist and Aristotelian approach in religious and ethical matters than we saw with figures like Aquinas and Scotus. But contrary to what you might expect, these same ideas can be seen as fruitful for science. If we cannot simply reflect on our universal ideas to discern invariable necessities of nature, then the only way to learn about the world is to go look at it. Thus, the nominalists also have a fairly well-deserved reputation for empiricism, and are often credited with taking important steps in the direction of modern science. One particularly crucial insight will be that mathematical concepts and tools can be applied to topics in natural philosophy. Again, we should avoid exaggerating here. The so-called nominalists certainly did not agree with one another about everything, and throughout the century there were plenty of realists fighting against the nominalist tide. In Occam's own day, he was challenged by Walter Burley, who continued to fly the flag for realism. A generation or so later, Wycliffe's snide reference to the doctors of signs already tells us where he stood. Eventually, this confrontation will crystallize into the 15th century Wegischreit, a German word that literally means dispute over methods. The battle lines will be drawn between the so-called Via Antiqua and Via Moderna. The ancient approach is traditional Aristotelianism, the modern approach that of the nominalists. For instance, a document written at Cologne in 1425 contrasts Thomas Aquinas, Albert the Great and other antiqui to the modern masters John Buridan and Marsilius of Ingin, two famous nominalists. Like the word nominalist itself, though, this contrast between ancient and modern is not yet used by the 14th century thinkers themselves. Whatever terms we use, we should not read back into the 14th century the 15th and 16th century tendency to divide scholastics into schools of thought like Occamists, Thomists, and Scotists. This is another point made by the aforementioned William Cordenay. He admits that there were brief periods where Oxford might have seen a wave of enthusiasm for Aquinas or Scotus, but these were usually short-lived and for a reason that may surprise us. We tend to think of medieval philosophers as being indebted to authority, as innovating only by mistake or because they could see no other way to find agreement between their various sources. But in fact, there were good career reasons for a master to show how clever and original he was. So, the game was to be innovative, but not so innovative that one ran into trouble with the church, a trick Occam, among others, did not manage to pull off. Of course, leading scholastics like Scotus and Occam still exerted tremendous influence on other thinkers. Usually though, this was because they set the terms of further debate, not because they ended debate by inspiring school allegiance. Take for instance, Scotus' distinctive idea of the formal distinction, meaning a real difference between two aspects of one and the same thing. In subsequent generations, some scholastics adopted it as a useful tool, especially for explaining the divine trinity. But even these proponents of Scotus' idea went beyond him by providing their own justifications for his distinction. Other scholastics rejected Scotus' proposal. One of them was Peter Auriol. He offered a subtle exploration of the formal distinction, but ultimately dismissed it on the basis that such a distinction between the Trinitarian persons would undermine divine simplicity. In the 15th century, the humanists will enjoy mocking this sort of hair-splitting and distinction-mongering much as some observers nowadays decry the apparently pointless and technical work done by analytic philosophers. Yet some of the greatest literary minds of the age were very interested in the output of the university schoolmen. I have already mentioned Dante and Chaucer as examples. But they also exemplify something else, something that will ultimately pose an even greater challenge to the intellectual hegemony of the scholastics, the use of vernacular language. Philosophical learning was steadily becoming more available to those who couldn't read Latin. In a sense, this was nothing new. It goes back at least as far as the 9th century English translation of Boethius, credited to King Alfred, and we saw 13th century examples like Mächtel of Magdeburg and Hardewich, or The Romance of the Rose. But it's in the 14th century that medieval philosophy really begins to feature lay authors and vernacular languages. Soon we're going to kick off the century with a figure who helps make this point, Marguerite Poretz. She's one of the most remarkable mystical authors of the 14th century, or of any century. She's not much like Occam, who has been mentioned so often in this introductory episode, but like him, she got in trouble with the church. In fact, she got in a lot more trouble than he did. Before looking at her, however, I want to pull a bit more on one of the strands that runs through the century to come. I've been saying that volunteerism is a central theme of 14th century thought, and after our look at Henry of Ghent and Scotus, you hopefully have a good sense of what the word means. But it will still be helpful for us to take a step back and think about the whole idea of volunteerism. What is it exactly, and is volunteerism philosophically defensible? An expert on this topic has volunteered to tell us. Tom Pink, who will be my guest next time here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.