Philosophy-RAG-demo/transcriptions/HoP 251 - Masters of the University - “Latin Averroism.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, Masters of the University, Latin Averroism. Consistency, wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson, is the hobgoblin of little minds. If so, it's much like the hobgoblin who features as one of the supervillains pitted against Spider-Man, regularly defeated. Perhaps no one manages to speak and behave with complete consistency, and many people lead double lives that require them to engage in doublethink. The anarchist who makes her living as a policewoman, the marriage counselor who cheats on his wife, the physicist who researches the Big Bang during the week and prays to a creator god on Sundays. Philosophers normally hold themselves to a higher standard though. Any philosopher who is caught out maintaining two mutually contradictory propositions can be expected to give up on one or both of those propositions, not just out of embarrassment but because consistency is a ground rule of proper reasoning. Least of all would we expect to find medieval schoolmen embracing inconsistency, having been trained in logic from a young age. How strange then that modern scholarship has associated a rather flagrant version of doublethink with the most convinced rationalists of the late 13th century, C.J. of Brabant, Boethius of Dacia, and whichever other masters of the Paris arts faculty followed their lead. Supposedly, C.J. and Boethius endorsed a doctrine of double truth. They thought that one in the same question might receive two true answers, one provided by the rational arguments of Aristotelian philosophy, the other by Christian faith. Aristotle has proved the world to be eternal, yet we know through faith that it was created in time and from nothing. Aristotle's greatest commentator, Averroes, has shown that there can only be one immaterial intellect for all humankind, yet Christian faith requires that we survive as distinct individuals after the death of our bodies. As arts masters, C.J. and Boethius were effectively professional philosophers, so they couldn't retreat from doctrines that were proven in Aristotle and Averroes. Still, they were Christians and unwilling to give up on the belief in creation or an individual afterlife. What solution could be more elegant than saying that both sides are correct, despite contradicting one another? Contemporaries were apparently convinced that these so-called Latin Averroes, or radical Aristotelians, embraced double truth. The prologue of the 1277 condemnations assembled by the Bishop of Paris, which we looked at in episode 249, complains that some members of the arts faculty believe that some things are true according to philosophy but not according to the Catholic faith, as if there were two contrary truths and as if the truth of sacred scripture were contradicted by the truth in the sayings of the accursed pagans. And there's also Thomas Aquinas. In a treatise he wrote attacking views that were being defended by certain unidentified masters he called Averroists, he wrote that one such master, probably Sigé of Brabant, thinks that faith is of things whose contrary can be necessarily concluded, so that faith is of the false and impossible. But with all due respect to Aquinas, these are hardly unbiased sources. The idea of double truth was obviously useful as an accusation, but was it really advanced as a positive doctrine by either Sigé or Boethius? Nowadays scholars are unanimous in saying no. Double truth is deemed to be a figment of earlier interpreters' imagination. But that doesn't mean that Sigé and Boethius were untroubled by apparent contradictions between Aristotelian philosophy and Christian faith, to say nothing of the trouble they might get into if they openly embraced the former at the expense of the latter. It would seem that Sigé in particular moderated his remarks, if not his true convictions, in response to Bishop Tanfier's first condemnation in the year 1270. Before 1270, Sigé unabashedly embraced problematic doctrines on the strength of philosophical argumentation. After 1270, he didn't exactly give up on those doctrines, but he did become increasingly cautious in talking about them. His writings contain regular warnings that he is merely reporting the views of the philosophers, not asserting them in his own right. Sigé emphasizes that he himself accepts the teachings of faith, whatever the philosophical arguments might say. Let's look at a specific example, the one highlighted by Aquinas in the treatise he wrote attacking the so-called Averroists. The Averroists include, as you would expect, Averroes himself. In his final and longest commentary on Aristotle's treatise On the Soul, Averroes made the striking, not to say bizarre, claim that all humans share one single intellect. Bizarre or not, he had good reasons for saying this. When both you and I understand something, we are understanding one and the same thing. If we've both taken a class on giraffe biology, we wouldn't expect you to have got your head around one nature of giraffe, while I have come to grasp some other nature of giraffe. Rather, we should both know about the same nature. But in that case, what could possibly differentiate your understanding about giraffes from mine? I just said that you got your head around giraffes, but according to Aristotle, your head has nothing to do with it. The intellect has no organ, and though you might use your brain to imagine giraffes competing in roller derby, or remember giraffes you have known and loved, you do not use your brain, or any other part of your body, when you engage in a proper intellectual understanding of giraffes. The mind that grasps the nature of giraffes has no special connection to your body, because its activity is purely immaterial. But for Averroes, matter is, as philosophers like to say, the principle of individuation. Without a relationship to matter, there is no way for multiple things to be distinguished one from another. We are forced then to say that there is only one act of understanding that grasps the nature of giraffes. When you and I complete our course on giraffeology, we have both come to engage in this single act of understanding. It's the activity of a single mind, which depends on people like us, who have wisely chosen to use their senses, imagination, and memory to learn about giraffes. If you and I enjoy the exquisite experience of knowing all about giraffes where other people do not, this is because it is our sensations and memories that are being used as the basis for a universal act of understanding about giraffes. The universal intellect is getting no help from the giraffe ignoramuses, so they don't get to share in that experience. I dare say you aren't convinced, and if not, you're in good company. Aquinas found this whole theory to be about as plausible as a giraffe on roller skates. He opens his treatise on the unity of the intellect by saying that the Averroists clearly contradict the teaching of the faith by denying that we can live on after death as individually distinct souls. He won't even bother insisting on this point since it's so obvious. Instead, he wants to show us that the Averroists are also contradicting Aristotle. Despite his extensive and respectful use of Averroes's commentaries in other writings, here Aquinas condemns him as not a peripatetic, but the perverter of peripatetic philosophy. In fact, you don't need either Aristotle or the Bible to realize that the notion of a single shared intellect is absurd, for it is clear that an act of understanding belongs to one particular human and not all humans. Still, it is worth explaining where the Averroists have gone wrong just to make sure everyone understands that the unicity doctrine is indeed a perversion of Aristotle, not a plausible interpretation of his words. Aquinas thinks the error is rooted in the way Averroes and his followers emphasize the mind's independence from the body. Once we see that the mind does somehow depend on the body, we have reason to say that your mind is different from mine, it depends on your body and not my body. Now, Aquinas agrees with Averroes that the mind has no bodily organ. This is stated loud and clear in Aristotle and besides, Aquinas has already said that we can keep using our minds after bodily death. However, the mind is only one power or capacity of a single soul, which is the form of the body, as Aristotle also says loudly and clearly. Aquinas accuses the Averroes of violating this clear teaching of Aristotle by making the intellect completely different from the human soul. For them, it's as if we are beings with a soul and body who then occasionally get access to a free-floating mind, like many computers accessing the same online content, or as Aquinas, less anachronistically, says, many people somehow seeing through a single eye. The irony, as we know from previous episodes, is that it is not the Averroes, but rather Aquinas who holds an unorthodox position on this score. Most 13th century thinkers did believe that the highest part of the soul, the part responsible for the activities of intellect and will, was a separate power or substance distinct from any forms that are seated in the body. So when C.J. defended such a pluralist idea about the soul, he was simply agreeing with mainstream scholastic ideas. Of course, it was far less mainstream for him to press on following in the wake of Averroes and point out that in that case there will be nothing to differentiate one separate intellect from another. We saw that one of the propositions condemned at Paris was that there cannot be many immaterial things of the same kind, like angels or on the usual 13th century understanding, human minds. We also said that Aquinas himself could have been the target of this condemnation. He thought that each angel must be unique in species, since it would otherwise be impossible for one angel to be distinct from another. So when C.J. started suggesting in the 1260s that Averroes' idea of a single intellect wasn't so crazy after all, he was himself being far from crazy. C.J. was simply combining a standard idea about the nature of the human mind, namely that it is independent from body and distinct from any bodily form, with a principle that even Aquinas admitted, namely that anything with a truly immaterial nature must be unique. But given the troubling implications, C.J. also wasn't crazy enough to endorse these ideas publicly after the 1270 condemnation. Instead, his final discussion of the intellectual soul begins by insisting that he will be, as he puts it, seeking the mind of the philosophers in this matter rather than the truth. He does go on to explain the case for the Averroes theory, but also presents arguments in the other direction and concludes by admitting that he is unsure how to resolve the issue. Especially with that last admission of uncertainty, C.J. might be responding to the condemnation, and indeed to Aquinas' attack on him, by adopting a less assertive position. He may have written these words at around the time of a 1272 statute adopted by all the arts masters in Paris, in which they sought to distance themselves from the rationalism that so provoked the bishop and theologians like Aquinas and Bonaventure. In this statute, the arts masters officially declared that they would steer clear of issues that are, so to speak, above their pay grade, because they fall under the purview of theology, not philosophy. Furthermore, they promised to refute any philosophical teachings that might be in tension with the faith. It has been suggested that C.J. and Boethius of Dacia may have been in full agreement with this statute, but in fact it seems unlikely that even the chastened C.J. of the mid-1270s would have been entirely happy with the form of words used by the masters. For he does not, unlike the statute, go so far as to speak of false philosophical teachings. Instead, C.J.'s considered view would seem to be that correct philosophical reasoning can lead to beliefs forbidden by faith. Though we should not be convinced by such reasoning, neither should we expect that we can find a flaw in the arguments. Rather, this is just a sign of our own limitations, limitations that affected even so great a thinker as Aristotle, who was himself only human, as C.J. remarks. One might say then that for C.J., philosophy can, at least on some more difficult topics, reach only provisional results. These results need to be checked against and potentially corrected by faith, because philosophy is not always in a position to correct itself. This is subtly different from the attitude we find in the other so-called Latin of Aroist, Boethius of Dacia. To get the traditional reading out of the way first, we do not find any straightforward two-fold truth theory in Boethius either. To the contrary, he staunchly upholds the ban on self-contradiction that is such a fundamental presupposition of Aristotelian logic. What Boethius has to say about conflicts between philosophy and faith is inspired by a different aspect of logical theory, the autonomous activity of individual sciences. Aristotle occasionally remarks that a given argument or issue is or is not germane to a given science. When a mathematician thinks about triangles, he doesn't need to worry about the material the triangular things are made of, and it is not the job of the natural philosopher to consider abstract metaphysical issues. In Boethius's hands, this idea licenses a strikingly autonomous conception of philosophy. The philosopher must proceed on the basis of natural reasoning, and insofar as we are doing philosophy, we shouldn't question the deliverances of this reasoning. In fact, we should even deny anything that conflicts with our scientific principles, for example that a dead person could return to life. But any arts master can also take off his philosopher hat and assume the role of a pious believer. With his Christian hat on, he will readily admit that there are things on heaven and earth that are not dreamt of in Aristotle's philosophy. This line of thought emerges most clearly in Boethius's treatise on the eternity of the world, which clearly explains the Aristotelian case against an absolute creation of the universe from nothing. Within natural philosophy, no change can arise out of nothing, but must involve the realization of some pre-existing capacity for change. Also, there can be no first motion, since every motion requires an antecedent motion to set it off. Of course, as Christians, we know that it is indeed possible for motion to begin, and for change to come from nothing at all. This is what happened when God created the world. But divine creation is a supernatural act, and thus beyond the ken of natural philosophy. As Boethius puts it, Whatever the philosopher denies or concedes as natural philosopher, this he denies or concedes from natural causes and principles. However nice it might be if we could show rationally that creation from nothing is possible, this sadly can't be done. It is foolish to insist on rational proof for things that can't be proven within the framework of natural science. So the philosopher should content himself with explaining what can and cannot happen naturally, letting the theologian concern himself with what might be supernaturally possible for God. Boethius's solution to the conflict between reason and faith does allow for the kind of doublethink mentioned at the beginning of this episode. Consider the Big Bang cosmologist who goes to church on Sundays. She might say that she isn't really being inconsistent, but just taking two different points of view on the question of where the universe came from. During the week, she pursues an answer using the tools of science, and on the weekend, she accepts a wholly different explanation on the basis of faith. This may seem irrational, yet Boethius would say it is anything but. To the contrary, it makes space for the purely rational endeavor that is science. There is no conflict between reason and faith, and indeed there cannot be such a conflict, since the philosopher readily admits that he is not speaking of what is the case absolutely, but only of what follows from the principles of his science. The implicit message is that the bishop of Paris and the theology faculty should back off and let the arts masters get on with their business of expounding Aristotle. This is an autonomous enterprise with its own ground rules. It poses no threat to the faith, since faith involves stepping outside the discipline of rational science so that the ground rules no longer apply. But this way, Boethius's proposal doesn't sound particularly shocking, and indeed it wasn't. Consider one remark he makes, When someone puts aside rational arguments, he immediately ceases to be a philosopher. Philosophy does not rest on revelations and miracles. The sentiment may sound familiar, since we saw Albert the Great saying almost exactly the same thing, When I am discussing natural things, God's miracles are nothing to me. We can find anticipations of Boethius's strategy in even more mainstream thinkers of the earlier 13th century, like the Paris theologian Alexander of Hales. Writing well before the contentious debates of the 1270s, Alexander stated that, Those philosophers who wished to prove that the world always existed proceeded only from the principles of natural philosophy. So if Aristotle and his followers denied creation, they did not do so in absolute terms, but only because they were speaking as natural philosophers. Why all the fuss then? A division of labor between the theologian and the philosopher had seemed reasonable in Paris only a generation before. Now, in the 1270s, it is tendentiously being presented as an admission that reason and faith reached two contradictory truths amidst accusations of error and heresy. To understand why, we need to distinguish between two groups of critics. On the one hand, there were men like Bonaventure and Bishop Tomfier. They had no time for the subtle qualifications offered by C.J. and Boethius. The caveats of the so-called Avaroists may have been sincere, but the fact remained that they were teaching teenaged university students how to prove the eternity of the world and the unicity of the human intellect. Like Socrates's jurors, the Parisian authorities saw this as an open and shut case of philosophy corrupting the youth. An aggravating circumstance could be added to the charge sheet too. I mentioned in passing in episode 249 that Bonaventure complained about contemporaries who thought happiness can be achieved fully in this life. While this complaint might apply to Albert the Great and Aquinas, both of whom recognized a limited form of earthly happiness, it makes more sense as an attack on the so-called Avaroists. Boethius of Dacia wrote a work called On the Supreme Good, which unhesitatingly takes the intellectual perfection of the philosophers to be the greatest aim of humankind. Very different, on the other hand, were the concerns of more philosophically-minded critics of the arts masters like Albert and above all Thomas Aquinas. Their worry was that the Avaroists were bringing philosophy itself into disrepute. As you'll hopefully recall from our first episode on Aquinas, he had his own way of understanding the relationship between natural reason and theology. For him, the two cooperate by making distinctive and valuable contributions to a unified body of demonstrative science. Human reason is augmented with the addition of new principles taken from revelation, but reason is never corrected or overridden by faith as Boethius would have it. For Aquinas, reason does exactly what Aristotle promised. It establishes necessary conclusions on the basis of indubitable first principles. And it would be a pretty poor necessary conclusion that comes with a footnote saying that it actually only holds when we are wearing our philosopher hats. In a sense, Aquinas's goal was the same as the one pursued by C.J. and Boethius. All three sought to make space for pure rational inquiry within the institutional framework of the medieval university. C.J. and Boethius attempted to do so by carefully qualifying their philosophical claims. C.J., stung by the condemnations, framed his exegesis of Aristotle with warnings about the limited competence of human reason. Boethius admitted that natural reasoning can always be trumped once supernatural phenomena are taken into account. But these were rather precarious ways of securing an autonomous role for science. Much better would be to show that science establishes truly reliable conclusions without having to worry that these conclusions will later be shown to admit of exceptions or just be outright false from the standpoint of faith. This was Aquinas's solution. He went so far as to integrate theology itself into a thoroughly Aristotelian picture of human knowledge, enthroning it as the new queen of the sciences which both draws from and contributes to rational inquiry. In this respect, Aquinas was a more radical Aristotelian than either Boethius or C.J. But of course, it's one thing to promise that there are no conflicts between reason and faith, and quite another to show how apparent conflicts can be resolved. We've seen in this episode how Aquinas sought to do that in the case of the Averroes teaching on the intellect, but that leaves the much thornier issue of the eternity of the world. Thornier because it was far more difficult to dispel the impression that Aristotle accepted an eternal world and that anyone who adopts Aristotelian science must follow him. In past installments, we've looked at this issue in late antique philosophers like Philophonus and in thinkers of the Islamic world like Akindi, Avicenna, Ahazali, and Maimonides. If you want to review some of those episodes, then you should do so as soon as possible, because you don't have forever until we start to look at the eternity of the world in Aquinas and his contemporaries, here on The History of Philosophy Without Any Caps.