 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, Keeping it Real – Responses to Occam. What does it mean to be an influential philosopher? The obvious answer would be that influential philosophers have followers, card-carrying members of traditions whose cards were stamped with the names of the founders. Many Platonists participated in the legacy of the one Plato. The Epicureans still celebrated the great man's birthday centuries after his death, and to this very day Germany has its fair share of Kantians and Heideggerians. But influence doesn't need to work that way. Philosophers can make their mark on history by inspiring thoughtful criticism, as Plato provoked Aristotle and Kant provoked Hegel. William of Occam was certainly influential in the first way, in that many self-silent nominalists have looked to him for inspiration even down to modern times. But among his contemporaries, his impact is shown above all by the criticism he attracted. Fellow nominalists disputed the fine points of his thought, and others mounted a spirited defence of realism, insisting that he had cut too deeply with his famous razor. One particularly important critic was a man we have already met, Walter Chatton, who was at Oxford at the same time as Occam. His objections seem to have had an unparalleled influence on Occam himself. We saw that he convinced his more famous Franciscan colleague to give up the early theory that universals are pseudo-entities in the mind, called ficta, and that was only one of several cases in which Chatton's arguments persuaded Occam to change his teachings. Both Chatton and Occam were in turn important influences on Adam Wodham, another Franciscan and a nominalist who studied with both men. Though Wodham did not adopt Occam's views across the board, he seems to have been the closest Occam had to a faithful adherent. His debates with John of Reading, a strident critic of Occam and a follower of Scotus effectively carried on the Occam-Scotus debate into the next generation. All these figures were active in England, but they also paid some attention to developments from across the channel at the University of Paris. A good illustration of this was a controversy concerning a central idea in the epistemology of both Scotus and Occam, namely intuitive cognition. This is the sort of cognition involved when we grasp particular things directly, prompting us to make judgments about the world around us. This includes judgment about which things exist. When a damsel in distress is tied to the train tracks and looks up to see a locomotive about to run her over, that is an intuitive cognition, and it causes her to judge that the train, unfortunately for her, is very much existent. By contrast, when after freeing herself from her bonds at the last moment, she goes back to her day job comparing the energy efficiency of steam and coal-powered engines, that is abstractive cognition because it involves making general and abstract judgments. So far, so straightforward. But there were doubts about the range of intuitive cognitions we can enjoy and about their exact nature. We saw in the interview with Susan Brower Toland that Occam extended this sort of cognition to non-existing things. God might make a non-existing thing appear to you just as if it did exist, giving you an intuitive cognition of it. As Susan mentioned, this was among the teachings of Occam criticized by Walter Chatton, and it was rejected even by Occam's closest follower Adam Wodham. Chatton complained that it came perilously close to the theory of another thinker of Occam's generation, Peter Auriol. Auriol was yet another Franciscan, and the most influential figure of the time to work on the continent. He taught in Bologna, Toulouse, and Paris and died in 1322 shortly after being made an archbishop in Provence. Auriol made a controversial proposal about human cognition. He agreed with Occam that only individual things exist in the outside world. To explain how it is that we nonetheless arrive at universal concepts in abstractive cognition, he suggested that the individual exists in our minds in a special way, which he called apparent being. This idea can also be applied to our intuitive cognitions. You know how when you're sitting on a train that is stopped at a station, and the train on the next platform starts to move, you have the sensation that your own train is moving? For Auriol, this would be an example of the way that individual things in the outside world can be grasped as having apparent properties, in this case motion. He gives the similar, but unsurprisingly more pre-industrial example of trees on a riverbank, seeming to move because you are on a boat moving down the river. For Chatton, both Occam and Auriol were undermining the very foundations of human knowledge. He complains that if Occam were right that we can have intuitive cognitions of things that don't even exist, then all human certainty would perish. As for phenomena like the apparently moving trees, these are not cases where sensation misleads us by actually presenting an unmoving thing to us as if it were moving. Rather, a higher faculty of the soul collects together successive cognitions of the trees, and on this basis we judge falsely that the trees are moving. A broadly similar explanation is offered by Wodum. The senses are not to blame. You aren't literally feeling your own train start to roll or seeing the trees move, even if it is all but irresistible to experience them as doing so. In a striking passage, Wodum illustrates the point by referring to an ancient teaching that denies the revolution of the heavens above us. Rather, it is the earth that turns with us on it, creating the illusion that the celestial bodies move. This is an important debate both philosophically and historically. It shows how the seeds of later worries about skepticism were already being planted in the 14th century. Auriol assumed that some cognitions are true and some not, even if they involve only apparent being. But as his opponents hasten to point out, it sounds as if it would be impossible for us to know which cognitions are the true ones. Important or not though, the debate was largely one waged among like-minded philosophers. Like Occam, Auriol, and Wodum were nominalists. They thought that everything outside the mind is an individual. Indeed, given that nominalism was such a prominent feature of 14th century thought, you could be forgiven for thinking that all scholastic philosophers of the time shared this point of view. But that's rarely the way things work in the history of philosophy. More usually, new intellectual movements are opposed by spirited defense and revision of more traditional ways of thinking. And so it was here. Even as nominalist allies like Wodum were tinkering with the train of Occam's thought, others were trying to derail it completely. The chief engineer of this development was Walter Burley. He hailed originally from Yorkshire and was educated at both Oxford and Paris, where he apparently was able to study under Duns Scotus. Later in life, Burley joined a group of scholars gathered around the Bishop of Durham, who helped him get out of jail when he was arrested for having trees cut down without permission. I like to think that he did it because he was annoyed at the way they seemed to be moving every time he sailed past in a boat. Despite the connection to Scotus, in his early career Burley champions not Scotus's subtle theory of common natures and individuation, but a form of realism closer to what we find in 13th century thinkers like Aquinas. According to this realist view, universals actually exist only in the mind, yet correspond to shared features that are present in particular things. Thus the universal tree would be fully abstracted in the mind, but the same nature would also be a part of each tree, a third item alongside the matter and form that combine to produce that tree. The common nature out in the world that answers to our universal idea of a tree is identical with all the particular trees, given that it is found in each of them. In due course, however, Burley became aware of Occam's vigorous attack on this form of realism. Occam showed the awkwardness of claiming that common natures are part of, or identical with, their instances. Aside from making the obvious complaint that the same thing cannot be universal and particular, common and individual, he pointed out that in destroying a particular thing, one would also destroy the common nature in that thing. When Burley chopped down a tree in the forest, he would be eliminating the very nature of tree-ness, which nonetheless survives in all the other trees. All of this is absurd. For Occam, the lesson was clear, nothing outside the mind can be universal in any way. But Burley saw that another solution was available. If it is incoherent to suppose that the universal out in the world is real by being identical with its particulars, why not say that it is real but distinct from its particulars? Burley begins to develop this solution in a commentary on Aristotle's physics, which he wrote in 1324. In this and other works, he adopts a position that is diametrically opposed to Occam's, and adds insult to injury by directing personal abuse at his opponent. He sarcastically remarks that Occam claims to know more about logic than any other mortal, calls him a beginner in philosophy, and for good measure, a heretic. More importantly, he meets Occam's nominalist polemic with a defense of wholehearted realism. The common nature of trees is no longer a part of particular trees, and so in some sense identical with each tree, it has a full-blown and distinct reality of its own. This is why it can survive destruction at the hands of a forest fire or an axe-wielding scholastic philosopher the way that individual trees cannot. Burley's later view is sometimes compared to Platonism, but he himself would deny the parallel. For Burley, the real universal tree never exists completely separate and unrelated to individual trees, as Plato wanted. Rather, it is a special kind of thing that exists wherever there are trees and in each tree without being a part of it. This may sound rather mysterious, but a good sense of what Burley has in mind can be gleaned from the way he responds to nominalist arguments. Occam claimed that for a realist, universals would have to be in more than one place at the same time and would need to have contradictory properties. For instance, when Socrates is not moving and Plato is, the universal humanity would be both at rest and in motion. To this, Burley says, This species' humanity is the same in Socrates and Plato. If it is said that the same thing is both here and in Rome, and simultaneously moving and at rest, we may respond that this species' humanity is one thing as a species, and there is no absurdity in something that is one as a species, being both here and in Rome, or simultaneously moving and at rest. Occam's mistake is the same as the one made by other, less radical realists, including Burley himself at a younger age. Both assume that the only way for a universal to be real is for it to be identical with, or a part of, a particular. In reality, a universal nature like tree-ness or humanity plays by different rules. Of course, Occam will here want to apply his famous razor, asking what could justify the apparently gratuitous assumption of such universal things outside the mind. An answer comes in Burley's commentary on Porphyry's introduction to logic, a standard context for treatments of this issue ever since late antiquity. Burley's main argument for realism has to do with our knowledge. Aristotle tells us that proper scientific understanding is universal in character. Surely then, there must be real universal objects for us to grasp. After all, it can hardly be that knowledge requires us to grasp all the particulars that fall under a given universal. Otherwise, as Burley puts it, we would need to know every last peasant in India before we could know the nature of humanity. Aristotle also says that the individual cannot be defined. Human and giraffe have entries in the ideal scientific dictionary, but Socrates and Hiawatha do not. So, if the nominalists were right, then neither knowledge nor definitions would latch onto things as they really are. As we know, Occam would have a reply for these arguments. He thinks that our knowledge and definitions have as their target concepts that we derive from individual things in the world rather than real universals in the world. Nonetheless, Burley has put his finger on a key potential weakness of the nominalist project. Admitting a mismatch between universal ideas and particular reality does give a foothold to skepticism, as we in fact just saw earlier in this episode with Oriel's idea of apparent being. You might nonetheless think that Burley's position is fatally undermined by depending too heavily on ancient ideas about knowledge. He grounds his argument for realism on the assumption that science and definitions are universal in character. As we saw, his opponent Occam did admit this Aristotelian doctrine too, so the assumption is dialectically effective. Still, it would certainly not command widespread agreement now, and this may make Burley's realism seem outmoded and poorly justified. Fortunately, Burley does have points to make in favor of realism that we might find more convincing. In his physics commentary, he points out that we often have desires that are not directed at any particular object. When I'm hungry, I want food, not some particular food. The same is true in commerce. If I have contracted to sell you a horse and you have already paid me, I can satisfy our agreement by giving you any one of the horses in my possession. Another consideration comes from language. When we first begin to use a word in a certain way, for instance by applying the sound tree to trees, we do not have in mind any specific tree, but are envisioning an open-ended use of this word for all trees in the future. So, it isn't only Aristotelian science that has universals as its target, but also pervasive features of everyday life, such as desires, promises, and language use. Still, Burley's realism is clearly motivated in large part by fidelity to Aristotle. It has been said that his goal is to be sound rather than striking or original. Predictably, he takes further umbrage at Occam's attempt to reduce the ten Aristotelian categories to a mere two, which by the way was not unique in this period, the aforementioned Peter Oriel thought he could get the list down to five. Against such attempts at reduction, Burley argues for the reality and distinctness of all ten categories. They are nothing less than the ten classes into which the real universals are divided. The categories do also apply to our mental concepts and language, but this is simply because our thoughts and language have the ten types of universals as their target. So, Occam's attempt to reduce all the properties of things to a single class of qualities is a flagrant departure from Aristotle's teaching and a failure to understand the structure of reality. And according to Burley, there's a further type of entity in the real world that is unjustly eliminated by Occam's nominalism. Categorial terms pick out simple items like one quality, place, time, or action, but there are also more complex items out there. For instance, one can know not only tree or green, but also that trees are green. Modern-day philosophers would call such things states of affairs or facts. True to form, Burley thinks that they too have distinct reality, on the basis that they can be grasped by the mind and expressed in language. Ultimately, it is the real fact that trees are green that is signified by the sentence, trees are green. But it would be unfair simply to say that Burley thinks that Occam is entirely wrongheaded when it comes to physics. He thinks that Occam is wrong about lots of other things too. To give just one other example, he rejects Occam's analysis of the process by which we sin. We saw in an earlier episode that, for Occam, morality has to do solely with the interior act by which we choose to perform our outward actions. This is of a piece with his voluntarism. It is not really in acting, but in willing to act that we do right and wrong. It's also of a piece with Occam's rejection of the more intellectualist approach to sin which acknowledges that moral evil could at least sometimes be the result of bad reasoning. By contrast, Burley looks back to 13th century intellectualism, sounding more like Aquinas than like his own voluntarist contemporaries. For Burley, we may often do wrong even when we know what is right, not by a perverse act of will but because we deliberate badly as when our reasoning processes are overwhelmed by the strength of our desires. Of course, like Aquinas, Burley still retains a place for the will. Our reasoning can be only a partial cause of action, and an exercise of the will is always required to bring the act to fruition. But, with this further disagreement between Burley and Occam, we are only skimming the surface of deep and troubled waters. Moral responsibility was a major topic of debate in the early 14th century. These same thinkers we've just been discussing tried to establish the conditions under which humans can do good and ultimately merit salvation. The radical voluntarism of Occam and his allies led them into dangerous territory. If the human will is genuinely free, then do we really need God's help in order to avoid sin? On the other hand, if God is genuinely free, can we have any confidence about whether and how He will offer us an eternal reward? For some contemporaries, notably Thomas Bradwardine, Occam did indeed go too far with his voluntarism so far that he undermined the fundamental principles of the Christian teaching on grace. It was a theological debate with philosophical implications, including the question whether we retain our freedom even if God knows in advance what we will do. As for instance, he already knows that you'll join me to hear all about Occam, Bradwardine, and the predestination debate next time on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.