The Routledge Companion to Seventeenth Century Philosophy

Dan Kaufman, Dan Kaufman

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317676966
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The Routledge Companion to Seventeenth Century Philosophy is an outstanding survey of one of the most important eras in the history of Western philosophy - one which witnessed philosophical, scientific, religious and social change on a massive scale.

A team of twenty international contributors provide students and scholars of philosophy and related disciplines with a detailed and accessible guide to seventeenth century philosophy. The Companion is divided into seven parts:

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• Historical Context
• Metaphysics
• Epistemology
• Mind and Language
• Moral and Political Philosophy
• Natural Philosophy and the Material World
• Philosophical Theology.

Major topics and themes are explored and discussed, including the scholastic context that shaped philosophy of the period, free will, skepticism, logic, mind-body problems, consciousness, arguments for the existence of God, and the problem of evil. As such The Routledge Companion to Seventeenth Century Philosophy is essential reading for all students of the period, both in philosophy and related disciplines such as literature, history, politics, and religious studies.

Part 1
Historical Context

1
The Scholastic Background

David Clemenson

Almost every major seventeenth century philosopher studied Scholastic philosophy at college or university.¹ Scholastic philosophical training of the period typically concentrated on the reading of textbooks, which usually took the form of commentaries on Aristotle’s major works. Some of the most influential of these textbooks were composed in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries by Jesuits or by Protestants indebted to their works.²

Baroque Scholasticism produced a plethora of lengthy and closely reasoned texts covering a wide range of fields. No brief study can do justice to the tradition and its effects on early modern thought. In this chapter’s first section, I have chosen to discuss a few doctrines and controversies characteristic of Scholastic metaphysics and philosophy of cognition in this period. The chapter’s second section lists some salient points of contact between particular seventeenth century philosophers and Baroque Scholasticism.³

1 Selected themes in Baroque Scholastic metaphysics and philosophy of cognition

1.1 Philosophy of cognition 1: the conceivability of individuals

Scholastics, following Aristotle, taught that all human knowledge is ultimately derived from the senses. On the standard Aristotelian account, the external senses perceive material individuals according to a particular sensory modality (e.g. the visual faculty perceives an individual such as Socrates simply qua colored, not qua human, or qua material substance).⁴ Sensations of different modalities are discriminated and coordinated into complexes (e.g. Socrates qua visible and audible) by an internal sense-perceptual faculty called the “common sense.” These complexes are stored in the “phantasy” (sense memory and imaginative power) as “phantasms” (images).⁵ The phantasy, a corporeal power like the senses, is able to divide and recombine images received from the common sense (e.g. of pink and of elephant) to form new, complex images (e.g. that of a pink elephant) not derived from the common sense or external senses. Phantasms are used by one of two incorporeal intellectual powers, the “agent intellect” (intellectus agens), to fashion “intelligible species” (roughly, concepts, whether in actual use or merely stored in the intellectual memory) that are received and stored in the other intellectual power, the “passive intellect” (intellectus patiens, also called the intellectus possibilis or “possible” intellect). This second incorporeal power is called “passive” because it is acted on by the agent intellect, but that does not mean that it is incapable of any productive activity of its own. On the contrary, the passive intellect divides and recombines the contents it receives to form new concepts not produced by the agent intellect, just as the imagination does with images it receives from the common sense.⁶

The intellect’s intelligible species or concepts exhibit material things’ natures, for example the nature of red or of horse, or of “metaphysical parts” of those natures (e.g. the genus of accident, for red, or of substance, for horse). It was a widespread view, derived from the Muslim philosopher Avicenna (ibn Sina), that in themselves natures are neither universal nor individual but susceptible of receiving either individuality (outside the intellect) or universality (in the intellect’s concept).⁷ There was thought to be no contradiction here: one and the same thing can be simultaneously individual and nonindividual, provided it is so in different respects, namely, outside the intellect versus inside it. (The notion of the “reduplicative sense,” formed by restricting a concept via some qualifying term such as “qua” or “insofar as,” was often used to block paradoxes that would otherwise result from application of the principle “identicals are indistinguishable”; cf. medieval discussions of the fallacy secundum quid et simpliciter, discussed in Novaes and Read 2008).

Scholastics commonly believed that universals are conceived only by the intellect. Jesuits and other Scholastics directly influential on the early moderns held, in addition, that some of the human intellect’s concepts exhibit individuals. Not all Scholastics agreed. St. Thomas Aquinas (1224/25–1274) and his more conservative followers held that the intellect cannot represent individuals through its own concepts but knows them only indirectly, by a “reversion to the phantasms” present in the corporeal phantasy (commentators disagree about what this reversion amounted to).⁸

The Jesuits, and others who disagreed with Aquinas and his followers on this point, were obliged to argue for their position.⁹ Among their arguments were the following. If the human intellect had no proper concepts of individuals, how could it form judgements such as “Socrates is human,” which obviously concern an individual? How could it refer to nonsensible individuals such as God? Without direct perceptions of individuals, how could the human intellect be superior to the senses, or akin to the intellects of angels, since (as was generally admitted) the senses and the angelic intellects do have such perceptions? Arguments of this sort were repeated by the Jesuit philosopher Manuel de Góis (1542–1597), author of the De anima portion of the widely read Coimbra series of commentaries on the works of Aristotle.¹⁰

The … view of those who say that sensible singulars are intellectually known (intelligi) by us, by means of a concept proper and peculiar to them, is true. This is accepted by Scotus (in 4, dist. 45, q. 3), Gregory [of Rimini] (in 2, dist. 3, q. 7), Durand [de Saint-Pourçain] (in 2, dist. 3, q. 7), Richard [of Middleton?] (in 2, dist. 24, q. 4, circa 3, principale), [Walter] Burley (1 Physics) and others. It is proved, first, by the fact that if sensible singulars could not be known (cognosci) in themselves (per se), and by a concept proper to them, this would be due either to their being singulars, or to their being sensibles. It cannot be because they are singulars; otherwise, no singular, not even one that was intelligible and non-material, would in itself (per se) fall under the scope of our intellect – not even in theology. Nor can it be because they are sensibles; otherwise, not even the common natures endowed with matter [e.g. the common nature of horse or of any other species of material object] would be intelligible in themselves…. Secondly, our intellect posits a difference or an agreement between the singular and the universal, through understandings (rationes) proper and peculiar to them, as when it judges that [the universal nature] man has a wider extension than [the individual nature] Socrates, or that outside the mind (in re) Socrates is the same as man: thus each, the universal and the singular, is properly and distinctly perceived by our intellect.

(Coimbra 1604, 441)¹¹

All the authorities cited in the previous passage are late thirteenth or early fourteenth century writers (an example of Baroque Scholastics’ reliance on their late medieval predecessors). Góis argues for the same view, with some additions, in his commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, published, like his De anima commentary, as part of the Coimbra series (Coimbra 1594, 1: 74–5). As authorities for the opposing view, which was that of St. Thomas Aquinas, Góis cites the Thomists Giles of Rome, Capreolus, and Cajetan, together with the Spanish Muslim commentator Averroes (ibn Rushd) and the Greek Aristotelian commentators John Philoponus and Themistius (Coimbra 1594, 440).¹²

Arguments similar to those of Góis may be found in the writings of the influential Jesuits Pedro da Fonseca (1528–1599), Francisco Toledo (1532–1596), and Antonio Rubio (1548–1615) – each of whom was read by Descartes during his college years (references to specific texts are given in Clemenson 2007, 7–13, 42–3). Jesuits were not the only ones to hold this position. The widely read Paduan philosopher Giacomo (or Jacopo) Zabarella (1533–1589) wrote, in his “De anima” (part of his larger work De rebus naturalibus),¹³

I, however, together with many others, judge that our intellect can also [i.e. in addition to knowing universals] know singulars. In support of this I bring the very powerful argument that in the soul’s faculties the higher faculty cognizes whatever the lower faculty does, and wherever the lower faculty leaves off, there the higher faculty begins; to deny this is to destroy the order and unity of the parts of the ensouled thing (animal). This is manifest in the phantasy, in relation to the external senses, for it can imagine all things which the senses can sense, but they differ in that the external senses do not sense an absent object, but only one that is present, while the phantasy imagines even absent things. Now, this difference is not to be understood to imply that the senses sense only present things, while the phantasy senses only absent things; rather, the phantasy senses both present and absent things…. And so, as the senses are directed to the phantasm, so the phantasy to the intellect. The difference between the intellect, phantasy, and all the senses must be of this kind: that the intellect can cognize (cognoscere) everything that the phantasy and senses cognize, and more besides, so that just as the senses and phantasy cognize singulars, so too must the intellect cognize singulars, and, in addition to them, universals, which neither the senses nor the phantasy cognize.

(Zabarella 1602, 950)

Among Zabarella’s other arguments for this view are that (1) that the soul can only know its own individual acts of intellection by the intellect, because such acts cannot be sensed, and (2) that the intellect must know individuals in order to know what individuality is, because (in the Aristotelian view) no property can be known except by abstraction based on knowledge of individual instances of that property (Zabarella 1602, 950–2).

The doctrine of the direct intellection of individuals seems to have been stoutly defended by Scholastics of the Baroque period – outside conservative Thomist circles.

1.2 General metaphysics: being as possibility

The claim that the human intellect’s concepts exhibit individuals is closely related to the claim that not all individuals are actual (where “all” does not, of course, range over actuals, but over possibles).¹⁴ Aristotelians agreed that any intellectual concept exhibiting an individual was indifferent to the actuality of that individual – the actuality of the cognized individual might be necessary to sensation, but not to intellection (for many Jesuits, not even sensation absolutely required the object’s actuality; see Clemenson 2007, 38–42).

(For the remainder of this chapter, the term “actuality” will be taken as synonymous with “existence either outside time or at some time”; “existence” will be taken as synonymous with “existence that does not consist simply in being the object of some cognition”; and the domain of quantifiers such as “all,” “every,” and “some” will be the class of all possible things or essences, whether actual or not, whether individual or not.¹⁵ In most contexts, “actuality” and “e...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• Contributors
• Acknowledgment
• Foreword
• PART 1 Historical context
• PART 2 Metaphysics
• PART 3 Epistemology
• PART 4 Mind and language
• PART 5 Natural philosophy and the material world
• PART 6 Moral philosophy and political philosophy
• PART 7 Philosophical theology
• Index of names
• Index of subjects