Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 297 - The Prague Spring - Scholasticism Across Europe.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 historyoffilosophy.net. Today's episode? The Prague Spring – Scholasticism Across Europe. When I took up my job teaching philosophy at the Ludwig Maximilians University in Munich, there were three things I wanted to know. Who was Ludwig, who was Maximilian, and where is my new office? The answers stretch back over the last half millennium and more. The university was originally founded by Duke Ludwig IX in 1472, which as it happens was exactly 500 years before my own birth. I'll just pause here to let you work out how old I am. At the start it was based in Ingolstadt, not Munich. From there the institution was moved to Landswet in 1800 by King Maximilian I of Bavaria. Only in 1826 did it come to Munich, thanks to another Ludwig, King Ludwig I of Bavaria, which is why my office is conveniently located here and not in Ingolstadt or Landswet. It's a long and storied history, yet by the standards of German universities you could argue that the LMU is a latecomer. The University of Heidelberg was founded about a century earlier in 1386, part of a movement that swept across Europe in the 14th century. Between the years 1300 to 1425, no fewer than 32 universities were founded, which is about one every four years. The older scholastic centres at Oxford, Cambridge, Paris, and Bologna faced competition from these brash new arrivals. A telling, though admittedly not unbiased, remark was made by Henry of Langenstein, a theologian who trained and taught at Paris before moving to the new university at Vienna. Behold, the universities of France are breaking up, the sun of wisdom is eclipsed there, wisdom withdraws to light another people. Are not three lamps of wisdom now lit among the Germans, that is, three universities shining with rays of glorious truth? These three lamps were the universities at Prague, Heidelberg, and of course Henry's own Vienna. The story of how he came to teach there is, to continue his metaphor, an illuminating one. Scholasticism spread across Europe because well-trained masters had reason to decamp from the traditional places of learning, and because the new places of learning were well-funded by the local nobility. The scholars needed good reasons to move, since they would be giving up access to book collection and a reliable stream of qualified students. In the case of Langenstein, his motive for leaving Paris was the Papal Schism. He was one of numerous scholars whose sympathy for the Roman Pope led him to abandon France, which was under the sway of Avignon. As for the role of the nobility, in the first, but certainly not the last case where the Habsburg family enters our history of philosophy, the university at Vienna was founded in 1365 with the support of Duke Rudolf IV. Greater Germany and Italy provided ideal conditions for the arising of such institutions because of the independent power of such local aristocrats who had an interest in promoting the economy and prestige of their home cities. They had freedom to do so, because in Italy there was no effective central authority, while in Germany, the Holy Roman Emperor did not exercise sufficient control to stop this sort of thing from happening. All a late 14th century noble needed was funding and permission from the Pope, and conveniently, there was even more than one Pope to choose from. Which is not to say that the creation of new universities always succeeded. Vienna needed some years to flourish, as did the university at Erfurt. Others failed completely. In Würzburg, for instance, a university was introduced just after 1400, but it fizzled out quickly. The city would have to wait until the late 16th century for a re-founding. In England, there was a similarly abortive attempt to create a northern rival to Cambridge at Oxford at Stamford. Such initiatives were often resisted by the old guard, as when Bologna required its newly minted doctors to promise not to teach elsewhere for two years. Despite their position as rivals, the new universities gave the old ones the sincerest form of flattery by imitating them shamelessly. They modelled their structure and even their curriculum on the older seats of learning, typically choosing either the pattern of Bologna, where law was the primary discipline, or that of Paris, where theology was the most powerful faculty. In Prague, problems were caused by an attempt to combine both models since it led to clashes between the law and theology faculties. Meanwhile, some schools carved out other specialisms. Erfurt was known for expertise in astronomy and in grammar, while the masters at Padua were quick to adopt the breakthroughs in physics from the Oxford calculators and combined an interest in natural philosophy with the study of medicine. Padua is also a good illustration for something else we should bear in mind, which is that universities were not the only context for scholasticism. As we've seen, friars of the various orders established their own basis for teaching. Think of Occam at London Grayfriars, or Albert the Great and other Dominicans in Cologne, where there would not be a university until 1388. The general term studium was applied quite liberally, basically to any grouping of teachers able to attract students. This applied to Padua already in the 1220s, even though the first talk of a university with an arts faculty there comes from 1262. The first outstanding intellectual based in Padua came several decades later. This was Peter of Abano, an expert in medicine and astrology. As so often with the leading masters at smaller universities he trained at one of the more established schools, in this case Paris. It's been suggested that an important feature of Italian scholastic culture in the Renaissance can be traced back to Peter of Abano. This is a tendency to adopt the controversial doctrines found in Iverroes's commentaries on Aristotle. Here, we might also think of Dante, another Italian and a contemporary of Peter who has been associated with Iverroism by some scholars. Or we might move ahead to the greatest figure of late medieval philosophy in Italy, Paul of Venice. He too studied at an older university, in his case Oxford. He then toured these schools of Italy, teaching in Padua, Siena, and Bologna. Where Peter of Abano's focus was natural philosophy, Paul of Venice's contribution was especially in logic and metaphysics. He too was powerfully influenced by Iverroes, to the point that in commenting on Aristotle he was sometimes effectively writing a super commentary on Iverroes. However, interpretations that have him adopting the notorious Iverroes theory of a single mind for all humans seem to be misplaced. And in the most prominent dispute of the late 14th century, between realism and nominalism, he was above all a follower of the British realists, Duns Scotus and John Wycliffe. Indeed, only one of several Italian scholars who defended what has been called Oxford realism. Like Wycliffe, Paul of Venice held that a universal is a real thing out in the world, but not something that exists independently of its instances. In fact, the universal human and individual humans are really the same things seen from two different perspectives, a central case of what Scotus called a formal distinction. Paul of Venice offers a clever twist on this theory when he comes to explain how exactly a universal-like human comes to reside in only one particular human, like Groucho Marx. In accounting for this, he draws on two very different theories taken from Thomas Aquinas and from Scotus. For Aquinas, Groucho gets to be an individual by being made of some particular chunk of matter. For Scotus, by contrast, Groucho's individuality is caused by a so-called hexaiety, the distinctive feature that belongs only to Groucho and picks him out as a particular human, the way that rationality distinguishes humans from other animal species. Paul of Venice avails himself of both explanations. When a human form comes to matter, the matter's reception of that form produces the distinctive hexaiety. This might seem like metaphysical overkill, since it could sound as if everything is individuated twice over, but it has advantages over both older theories. Unlike Aquinas, Paul does not have to say that Groucho's individuality is just borrowed from the individuality of Groucho's matter, as if being a particular human is nothing more than being made out of this flesh and bone rather than that flesh and bone. It is the individuating feature that guarantees Groucho's particularity. But unlike Scotus, Paul can explain how that distinctive feature came to belong to Groucho in the first place by being associated with his particular matter. In this sense, matter is still the principle of individuation. Another scholastic thinker who worked in Italy, and like Paul of Venice, a member of the Augustinian order, was Gregory of Rimini. Following the familiar pattern, he studied in Paris before serving the Augustinians in Bologna, Padua, and Perugia, finally becoming head of the order in 1357 and dying in Vienna in 1358. We actually met Gregory briefly in a previous episode on logic when we talked about his idea that states of affairs are complex objects of signification. This is indeed his signature view, or at least one of them. It constitutes another step in the direction of realism, since for Gregory, such states of affairs are real things which we can signify or express with propositions. In fact, we can distinguish three levels of reality where a strict nominalist like Occam would only want one, the level of concrete individual objects. The weakest sort of reality, as by Gregory, belongs to states of affairs that may or may not be realized, like Groucho's smoking a cigar. More real than this is a state of affairs that is in fact realized, as when Groucho in fact smokes the cigar. Yet such a realized state of affairs is still not as real as the concrete individuals that realize them, like Groucho himself or his cigar. Gregory can also be contrasted to Occam when it comes to ethics. Again, the notion of a state of affairs is relevant here. Gregory uses this notion to absolve God of responsibility for creating evils. The fact that something bad happens or that a sin is committed is not one of the fully real things created by God, like Groucho or a cigar. It is only a complex object of signification, a state of affairs brought about by the human sinner. Furthermore, these states of affairs have an intrinsic badness that is not decided only by God's legislating will. Here, Gregory moves away from the voluntarism of Scotus or Occam, arguing that even if God did not exist, sinful states of affairs would still be sinful because they would be in conflict with reason. This allows Gregory to do what he usually wants to do as a member of the Augustinian order, validate the judgments of Augustine himself, who in this case had said that sin is a violation of right reason. Let's now turn our attention north, to Germany, and in particular to Heidelberg, where nominalism was finding a more favorable reception. This was especially thanks to Marsilius of Ingen, who was not to be confused with the pioneering political thinker Marsilius of Padua. This Marsilius was, like Gregory of Rimini and Peter of Habano, responsible for exporting Parisian scholastic thought to new territories. Like Henry of Langenstein, he may have left Paris because of the tensions surrounding the Papal Schism. This was much to the benefit of the new university at Heidelberg, which he helped found and served numerous times as rector. Especially influenced by John Buridan in physics, and by Occam and Gregory of Rimini in logic, and its application to theological questions, Marsilius's thought is not easy to encapsulate briefly, but a good example of his approach can be found in his solution to the much-discussed problem of future contingents. Like other scholastics, he wanted to safeguard human freedom in the face of God's certain awareness of what we will do, before we do it, and indeed before we even exist. He was, however, reluctant to admit that humans actually caused God already to have known what we will do. This is not so much for the reason we might expect, namely that this would involve us exerting causal influence on the past, but because he did not want God to be subject to causal influence from his creatures at all. Marsilius is generally skeptical about using the techniques of logic to understand God's nature. It is one thing to show how it may be contingently true that I perform a given action, another to say that God is made to know that truth by my action. A rather similar debate was unfolding at the same time in Austria, at the aforementioned University of Vienna. Here too, the nominalists were in favor, with Occam, Woodham, Buridan, and Marsilius himself all on the reading lists. But the Vienna schoolmen had trouble deciding how far to follow Occam on one particular point. He had argued vehemently against Scotus's use of the formal distinction, the very distinction that was being used to defend realism by Wycliffe in England and by Paul of Venice in Italy. For Occam, there is only one context in which we can recognize two genuinely different, yet also somehow identical, things. It applies in the case of the Trinity, where the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit are all God, yet three different persons. Gregory of Rimini pointed out the problematic implication. If the formal distinction is generally unacceptable, yet allowable in this one case, doesn't that show that our normal canons of logic and metaphysics break down in the case of God? And doesn't that show that theology is, well, irrational? We find engagements with this problem by two leading masters of Vienna, both named Henry. First, there was Henry of Oita, who made the following cunning observation. For him, as a good nominalist, the sort of realism endorsed by Platonists and men like Walter Burleigh is false, but it is not completely irrational. One can imagine that there could be a paradigmatic universal human which stands over all individual humans, it is just that there are good arguments to show that we do not need to posit such a Platonic form. Thus, it would be in harmony with reason to posit an overarching nature in God which would stand over the three persons the way that this supposed universal human would stand over the three Marx brothers. A different view was taken by another Henry, the aforementioned Henry of Langenstein. Or actually, I should say that he took two different views. At first, he accepted Occam's teaching that the formal distinction can be allowed in the one special case of the Trinity, but then he changed his mind. Like Marsilius worrying about the application of philosophical tools to God's knowledge, Henry of Langenstein suddenly began to argue that Aristotelian philosophy is simply inadequate for grasping the Trinity. Much as Aristotle's natural philosophy is rendered incomplete or worse by our belief that God can create from nothing, so Aristotle's logic cannot provide the resources we need in theology, or for that matter even the resources needed to solve such insoluble puzzles as the liar paradox. Some have proposed that the dissemination of nominalist thought across greater Germany was the work of a so-called school of Buridan, with first and second generation students carrying John Buridan's logic and physics to these new universities. Though this is probably an exaggeration, it is certainly true that his commentaries on Aristotle's physics and his logical writings were widely read. One of his main inheritors in physics was Albert of Saxony, not to be confused with his fellow German Albert the Great. But this Albert was not so bad either, noteworthy for his application of ideas from both Occam and Buridan in physics. He has also been hailed for his contributions in epistemology because of his penetrating critique of the tendency of other nominalists to think that we grasp things through an intermediary, namely a concept. Thus, if I see Groucho smoking a cigar, Buridan would not agree with Gregory of Rimini that I am grasping a real state of affairs in the world, but he would say that I am grasping Groucho as cigar smoking by forming an appropriate proposition about him in my mind. In other words, I represent him to myself at the level of concepts. Instead, Albert of Saxony thinks that we can just immediately grasp the external object. The only thing here that has the status of a concept is the very act by which the mind grasps Groucho. Here, we may be reminded of similar debates from the 13th century, as in Peter Olivey's epistemology of direct perception, which he put forward as a critique of theories like that of Roger Bacon, who thought we would perceive things through an intermediary image called a species. Let's finish today's episode in Prague. Here too, the works of nominalists like Buridan and Marcilius of Ingin were influential, but it was the ideas of the realist John Wycliffe that triggered the most intense debate. His realism about universals was already known in Prague by the 1370s. Two early adherents were Stanislav Avsnlodzmo and Stephen Palec. Stanislav was forced to recant his adherence to Wycliffe's teaching on the Eucharist, but this was nothing compared to the trouble that awaited two other figures at the university. These were Jerome of Prague and Jan Hus. Jerome had visited England and picked up knowledge of Wycliffe's doctrines there, while Jan Hus wrote out a set of glosses to Wycliffe in 1398. These include the remark, Out Germans Out, a manifestation of the Czech nationalism that Hus was fusing together with his daring adherence to Wycliffe's critique of the Church and Eucharistic theology. As the historian Frantisek Szmahel has written, the Wycliffeites presented their dispute over Wycliffe to the Czech public as part of the struggle for the fulfillment of the natural rights of the holy Czech nation within the university, in Prague, and in the whole kingdom. The controversy over Wycliffe's teachings came to a head in 1409, when the opponents of those teachings decamped from the university in protest at being required to attend disputations held by masters they considered to be heretics. Within the space of a few years, Wycliffe's books would be burned and Jan Hus and Jerome of Prague would be executed as an outcome of the Council of Constance. In the short run, then, this particular attempt to export scholastic ideas was a failure, as realism itself came to be tainted by association with insurrectionary nationalism. But in the longer run, it's clear that Prague was a harbinger of things to come, a reformation before the reformation. As with our look at Gerson and Wycliffe himself, then, this whirlwind tour of Europe has shown us that the characteristic features of the coming historical age were already present in late medieval culture. I wanted to devote an episode to the universities across Europe, in part to provide context for the developments we'll be seeing when we move on to the 15th and 16th centuries, when a lot of the action will be in Italy and Germany. But if we're thinking about 14th century developments that set the stage for the 15th century, then there is one more person we cannot afford to miss out. Even more than Gerson, Wycliffe, or Christine de Pizan, he anticipates a major current of thought in the next century. So join me next time as we have our first glimpse of the movement known as humanism in the very last Thinker we'll be covering in these podcasts on medieval philosophy, Petrarch, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps.