Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 263 - One in a Million - Scotus on Universals and Individuals.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, One in a Million – Scotus on Universals and Individuals. Roses are red, violets are blue, sugar is sweet and so are you. This charming traditional poem may be suitable for a declaration of love between 7-year-olds, yet upon closer inspection it proves to be rather perplexing. For one thing, surely violets are violet, not blue. For another thing, what exactly does it mean to say that all roses are red? The poem doesn't say that this or that rose is red, but that all roses are red. Actually, of course, it's also not true that all roses are red. The author of this poem clearly wasn't much of a gardener. But let's leave that aside and focus on making philosophical, rather than botanical, sense of the remark. It takes us back to a set of puzzles we met in the 12th century when Peter Abelard and his rivals disputed the question of universals. Abelard was a nominalist. In other words, he held that there is no real, universal nature that belongs to all roses and is responsible for their being roses. Nor is there any universal nature of redness that belongs to all red things. For Abelard, all real things are individuals, and when we call a given individual red or rose, we are simply applying general names that apply in virtue of the similarity between things. It's because this individual flower is like that one that we do not call this rose by any other name, regardless of whether it would smell as sweet. Opponents of Abelard, like William of Champo, were realists, meaning that they took the universal nature of roses to be something real that is present in each and every single rose, and likewise for redness in each red thing. If you think about it, there's actually another puzzle lurking here too. It's really a remarkably complex poem. I have in mind the problem of individuation. Again, this is a difficulty we encountered in the 12th century in the work of Gilbert of Poitiers, who wondered what makes each thing an individual. Though we treated these two philosophical issues separately in the earlier episodes, they obviously make a good pair. The problem of universals is about what things in a given class have in common with one another. What makes all roses roses. The problem of individuation is what makes a member of a given class different from the other members of that class. What makes the rose in my lapel to be a unique rose distinct from all the other roses in the world. These problems were certainly discussed by earlier 13th century thinkers like Aquinas, but in this episode I want to look at how Scodas, our final thinker of the century, rose to the challenge of solving both puzzles, and in so doing set the terms of the later debate. Let's start with Avelard's central idea, the one that really led him to his nominalist position, namely that everything that is is one individual. On the face of it, this looks plausible or even obvious. How can a thing exist without being just the one thing that it is? In fact, cast your mind back to one more previous medieval discussion about the doctrine of transcendentals. According to that doctrine, everything that has being also has unity, or to put it another way, everything that is is one. But we're already several minutes into a podcast episode on Scodas, so it's well past time for a subtle distinction. Scodas agrees with Avelard that all real things are one, and thus preserves the idea that unity is a transcendental, that is a feature of all things with a scope equal to that of being. But he denies that whatever is one is an individual. His way of putting it uses traditional Aristotelian language to express a novel idea. He says that there is a kind of unity that is less than numerical unity. This lesser kind of unity is the kind possessed by common natures, shared among multiple things, as all roses share the nature of being a rose. Since common natures have a degree of unity, they also have a degree of reality or being. So, it would be tempting to label Scodas as a realist within the debate over universals. He is, after all, saying that shared natures are real. But just as every rose has its thorn, there is a sting in every tail told by Scodas. He strenuously denies that universals exist in external reality. For him, universality is a feature of our mental life. We have a general or universal understanding of roses that we abstract from all our encounters with particular roses, but there's no such thing as a universal nature of rose that exists by itself out there in the world. That, at least on his understanding, is what would be claimed by the Platonic theory of forms, a theory Scodas thinks is obviously false. To say that there is a Platonic form of rose would be like saying that the very nature of roses is itself a separate individual, which is not just false, but in fact rather silly. Nor is the nature of the rose a full-blown individual thing that is a part of each individual rose, like an individual person might be part of the crowd at a botanical garden. So, when Scodas asserts that the common nature of roses is real, he sees himself as offering a moderate view between realism about universals and the sort of position adopted by Abelard which ascribes no reality to common natures at all. Against the nominalists, he claims that common natures are real. Against realists, he claims that common natures are not in themselves universal, and that they have a lesser degree of unity and reality than that possessed by more familiar things like particular roses, which are individuals. Needless to say, Scodas has clever arguments for all this. It's easy for him to show that the common nature is not a full-blown individual. If that were the case, then the nature of roses would be numerically only one thing. The result would be that there could only ever be one rose, a result whose absurdity will be evident to anyone other than Saint Exupéry's character, the Little Prince. It's more difficult to show that common natures are not only in the mind, where they are grasped universally, but also out there in the real world. Well, it would be difficult for most people, but this is Scodas, and he's able to produce several arguments to prove the reality of shared natures. For one thing, we need them to account for causation. In most cases, we see that causes pass on some kind of shared nature to their effects. Humans generate humans, sugar makes things sweet, and maybe roses germinate further roses, though I'm not much of a gardener either, so I wouldn't swear to it. For another thing, and more importantly, we do grasp things out there in the world by subsuming them under general concepts. This doesn't mean that there is anything universal out there, like there is in the mind, but our universal notion of roses must be latching on to a common nature that is somehow actually in all roses. Otherwise, universal concepts like rose or flower, which are examples of the species and genera so beloved of medieval logicians, would be pure fictions. Scodas thus signals his agreement with Avicenna, who stated that, What this means, at least on Scodas's understanding, is that one and the same common nature appears in both particular horses and in the universal idea of horse. The nature is neither universal nor particular in itself. We make it universal by thinking about it, as when we make a universal judgment, such as horses like eating roses. The nature can also be part of a real individual in the world, and it's this that justifies such general judgments. When I think that horses enjoy a nice rose now and again, I'm thinking about all the individual things that share the nature of hoarseness. This is, of course, just to say that I'm thinking about all the individual horses. Notice, though, that just as hoarseness doesn't care whether it appears in a universal thought or in a particular horse, so it doesn't care which particular horses it belongs to. As Scodas puts it, And this makes sense. Suppose God had decided not to create Secretariat, so that that particular horse never existed. This would make a big difference to the history of horse racing, but no difference at all to the nature of horses. So, that's Scodas's explanation of how horses are horses, roses are roses, and nominalists and Platonists are both wrong. But we still have our second problem of how individual horses and roses are individuals. In fact, Scodas's story might even seem to make this problem worse, because he's insisting that the nature of roseness, or hoarseness, in an individual rose or horse is not in itself individual. Remember, that nature in itself has less than numerical unity, it remains common or shared even when it is part of a given individual. Evidently, then, it is nothing about the nature of roses that makes this rose the particular rose that it is. No surprise there, Scodas would say, again, if the very nature of rose were responsible for individuality, there could only ever be one individual rose. Clearly, then, we're going to need a different explanation of how things become individuals. In fact, there were several explanations available to Scodas being defended by various contemporaries. We've already met one of them in the context of the 1277 Condemnations. As you might recall, there was a kerfuffle over the question of how angels become individuated. This posed a problem for Thomas Aquinas, because he thought that things of the same kind are individuated by matter, that is, one rose is distinct from another rose because it is made of different material stuff. Since angels have no matter, Aquinas was forced to conclude that each angel is unique in its species. Even God cannot make two distinct immaterial things of the same kind. It's in the context of this very same question about angels that Scodas takes up the problem of individuation in his early Lectura. In typical scholastic fashion, he considers a series of proposals about how individuation occurs and refutes each of them. The explanation in terms of matter was also the topic of a debate between Scodas and a follower of Aquinas named William Peter Godinus. Scodas makes several rather convincing points against the theory. For starters, matter is supposedly that which survives when something is destroyed. When a rose dies, its lifeless corpse might be put into the compost, which is then used to grow another bed of roses. In this scenario, a given bit of matter might belong first to one rose and then another rose, and obviously one in the same matter can't be responsible for distinguishing one rose from another. Also, even if we granted that matter makes the rose individual, then we could still ask, what makes the matter individual? Matter doesn't, after all, seem to be just intrinsically something individual, given that all sorts of different things are made of it. So, in order to use Aquinas's explanation, we actually need a further explanation of how this matter that constitutes this rose became this bit of matter, rather than some other bit. As I say, this is only one of the theories Scodas wants to uproot. Another was put forth by Henry of Ghent. He had the rather curious idea that individuation can be explained negatively, or rather by a double negation. What makes something an individual, is that it is not identical with other members of the same species, and that it is not divided into further individuals. In other words, are roses distinct from other roses, and that things that make it up are parts, not whole entities? Scodas gives this answer short shrift. We don't want to hear what individuals are not, but how they are what they are. We want a positive account of individuation, and in this case, two negatives don't make a positive. I think Scodas is right to criticize Henry here, or at least to criticize Henry as Scodas is understanding him. The fact that one rose is not identical to another is precisely what needs to be explained, it's not the explanation. So far, though, Scodas has himself only told us two ways not to explain individuation. We're still waiting for the right answer. To get our heads around that right answer, it might help to go back to what we were just saying about matter. If a thing is individuated by its matter, Scodas complained, then that matter would itself need to be individuated by something else. This kind of problem bedevils many attempts to explain individuality, as we saw in that episode on Gilbert of Poitiers. If a thing is individuated by its place, say, or by its accidents, then what individuates the place or the accidents? What we need is a principle of individuation that is, unlike matter or the common nature, itself individual. We need a nature that is singular, rather than common, that belongs to only one thing and can belong only to that thing. In the history of philosophy, such a singular nature is usually called a hexaiety, from the Latin word hec meaning this. Basically, the word means thisness. It's still used routinely by metaphysicians today, so that this concept constitutes one of Scodas's most prominent and long-lasting contributions to later philosophy. Actually, he has loads of such contributions, but this one is more obvious than most. Scodas hardly ever uses the Latin word hexaiety himself, though it was enthusiastically bandied about by his followers. He prefers such phrases as form of the individual, lowest-level form, or difference of the individual. That last expression is particularly illuminating, because Scodas explains the singular nature by drawing an analogy to the difference that picks out one species from another species in the same genus. If we have a large class or genus, like flowers, then this specific difference of roses will be whatever distinguishes roses from other flowers. Perhaps that roses are the only flower that have thorns. Of course, this isn't true, and apparently botanists insist that those sharp things on roses should in fact be called prickles. So much for every rose having its thorn. But as I told you, I'm not much on botany. I refer you instead to Albert the Great. Anyway, let's suppose, for the sake of argument, that the species of rose is distinguished from all other flowers by having thorns. In just the same way, according to Scodas, Secretariat is distinguished from other members of the species of horse by Secretariat's singular essence, or hexaiety. The upshot is that individuals are made up of two aspects or parts. First, each thing has its common nature, which makes it like other things. Second, it has its singular essence, which makes it be a specific individual. Secretariat is thus made up of both hoarseness and secretariat-ness. So in a way, Scodas agrees with that assumption that drove Abelard to his nominalism, that everything that exists is individual. Officially, Scodas of course denies that everything real is an individual, since common natures are real. But common natures don't just hang around on their own, as the Platonist claims. They are only ever found conjoined to, or contracted by, the hexaieties that make things individual, or when we universalize the common natures in our minds. To put it another way, full-blown reality always involves numerical unity, that is individuality. Indeed, the two natures in each thing, one common and one singular, are said to be only formally distinct, in the latest deployment of what may be Scodas's favorite distinction, though this, like Secretariat's Triple Crown, is a title for which there was plenty of competition. While all of this is clearly quite clever, it is also rather unsatisfying. Doesn't Scodas's solution boil down to saying that what makes me individual is just whatever makes me individual? It's hardly helpful to say that I am Peter Adamson thanks to my Peter Adamson-ness. The analogy to this specific difference is a bit more illuminating, but it doesn't really help me envision what that feature could be that makes me the individual I am, distinct from other humans, the way that thorns might make rose the species it is, distinct from other flowers. There's a good reason for this, though. Scodas thinks that in our current embodied life, the singular essence is not something we can grasp. God can understand hexaieties, but in this life at least, humans cannot do the same, something Scodas blames either on original sin or our dependence on sensation. This turns out to be helpful for Scodas in wriggling out of an exegetical embarrassment. Aristotle says quite clearly that individuals have no essences, whereas Scodas is insisting that they do. He avoids outright contradiction with Aristotle by saying that when Aristotle denied that there are individual essences, he just meant that there are no such essences that we can know. This interpretive move is, I have to say, about as lame as a one-legged horse. On the bright side, though, Scodas has achieved resounding agreement with Aristotle on a different point. In Aristotle's theory of knowledge, scientific understanding is said to involve universal judgments. Scodas can now explain why. It's because singular essences are unknowable for us, even though they are real. We infer their reality only by an indirect argument, on the basis that if there were no hexaieties, nothing could be an individual, something the Scodas scholar Peter King has compared to postulating the existence of an unseen planet on the basis of its effects on other heavenly bodies. But, no sooner has Scodas ratified the traditional Aristotelian doctrine that science must be universal, than he, characteristically, makes yet another departure from Aristotle. Just as characteristically, it takes the form of a distinction. The sort of understanding involved in Aristotelian science is universal and abstractive cognition. But there's another kind of cognition available to the intellect, and Scodas calls it intuitive cognition. This is a little bit misleading for the modern reader. We typically use the word intuition to mean something like instinctive or inspired insight, as in the tacitly sexist phrase, women's intuition. This is not what Scodas means by it. Instead, he means something like direct acquaintance with a thing, as opposed to the sort of cognition involved when you make a judgment about that thing or use general concepts abstracted from sense experience. Obviously, it is the latter abstractive sort of cognition that is involved in Aristotelian science and analyzed in medieval logic. And this is the kind of activity that medievalists usually took to be characteristic of the human mind. The intellect grasps roses universally, by means of a general, abstracted concept of roses. But Scodas insists that the intellect is also capable of simply grasping an individual object, simply because it is present to us in existence. Actually, insists is a bit strong. He does make the claim forcefully in some passages, but in other places he says that intuitive cognition is impossible in this life just like understanding of hexaieties. Still, when he speaks in favor of the idea, he gives compelling arguments and examples. For one thing, clearly sensation is able to engage in intuitive cognition. Seeing or smelling a rose would be a paradigm case for this kind of intuition. The particular rose simply presents itself to sensation. But intellect is better than sensation, so how can it be incapable of something that sense perception does all the time? Also, if we assume that the intellect can grasp individuals intuitively, this explains how it is able to apply its universal ideas to particulars. In order to judge that Secretariat is a horse, and therefore likes eating roses, the intellect had better be able to grasp Secretariat somehow. Also, there is the phenomenon of self-awareness, which we discussed some episodes back in an interview with Therese Corry. In this case, too, the intellect is having an intuition, since it is grasping itself as present to itself, not using some kind of abstract concept of itself. 14th century thinkers like Occam are going to use this idea of intuitive cognition too, and with less hesitation than Scodas. This exemplifies his far-reaching influence. You might have noticed that I have devoted a lot of attention to Scodas. This is in part because he's just so brilliant, but also because he brilliantly sets the stage for 14th century philosophy. Many of the main themes we'll be looking at in episodes to come, especially the ones on scholastic thinkers, revolve around Scodas's ideas. His voluntarism in psychology and ethics, and his realism about common natures, both provoked vigorous debates, as did such technical moves as his formal distinction and the contrast between absolute and ordained power. Since Scodas was a Franciscan, his ideas were especially influential among thinkers of this order, even if they were not always accepted. We'll see a fine example of this when we get to his fellow Franciscan, William of Occam, himself one of the rare prominent thinkers in an unjustly ignored period of philosophy, the 14th century. But, before we do turn to the 14th century, it will be well worth spending just a bit more time in the company of Duns Scodas. We're going to focus a little bit more on his influential theory of cognition, which I've only sketched rather abstractly in this episode. My intuition tells me you won't want to miss an interview on this topic with Giorgio Pini as we finish off our look at Scodas and the 13th century, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.