Résumés des communications donnés en octobre 2014 à l'Université de Fordham/Abstracts of the speeches given in New York in October 2014 at Fordham University
Ian Drummond, University of Toronto: “Duns Scotus on Whether Moral Virtues Cause Moral Goodness”
In this paper, I discuss how John Duns Scotus explains the frequently quoted Aristotelian dictum “Virtue renders the agent and the act good.” I focus on distinction 17 of book 1 of his Ordinatio, where he considers whether the moral virtues have a causal role with respect to the moral goodness of the acts of a human agent.
Since Scotus agrees with most medieval philosophers that the moral virtues are habits that incline an agent to right action, I first discuss his account of what habits in general contribute to action by inclining a power. Scotus describes two possible solutions that are based on his general account of natural causation and of powers, whereby an occurrent act of a power is an accidental quality that can exist in various degrees and can be elicited with different circumstances. It is noteworthy that he does not determine the issue, but concludes only that both accounts can be defended inasmuch as each adequately explains how a habit perfects an act by increasing its intensity and by causing it to be done with greater ease, pleasure, readiness and promptness.
However, this natural perfection is possible for acts of any power, whether they are up to the agent or not, whereas moral goodness pertains to acts only insofar as they are voluntary; it must therefore be something distinct, and thus its explanation will not depend on deciding between these two accounts of habit in general. Secondly, therefore, I explain how Scotus distinguishes moral goodness from merely natural goodness. Scotus defines moral goodness as a relation of conformity between a right judgment of practical reason, in light of which a free agent is able to determine his or her own actions, and the act that is freely elicited in conformity with that judgment. Thus, while any power can have more perfect acts when it acts according to inclination, only the free acts that originate in the will can have moral goodness.
I conclude by considering what role is left for the moral virtues in Scotus’s account. Since an act is not morally good unless it is freely elicited in light of a right practical judgment and both of these acts are possible without prior inclination, the moral virtues do not have any integral role in the causation of morally good act. Nevertheless, it helpful to have them, since by definition a moral virtue will give an inclination only to acts that would be good if elicited for the right reason; however, they can give this inclination only according to their general character as habits. What then distinguishes a moral virtue from a habit that happens to incline rightly? Scotus answers this in a very tenuous fashion: just as moral goodness is the relation of conformity between a voluntary act and a dictate of right reason, so a habit of action is a moral virtue if it is somehow related to a habit of right judgment.
Nicolas Faucher, Laboratoire d’Etudes sur les Monothéismes-Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes: “What does a habitus of the soul do? The case of the habitus of faith in Bonaventure, Peter John Olivi and John Duns Scotus”
In medieval psychology, the notion of habitus is very commonly encountered. Indeed, a habitus is none other than a disposition to do something. It can be found in the body or in the soul of an agent and corresponds to a particular act which it is a disposition towards. In particular, the soul can accomplish acts, which implies that there are corresponding habituses inside the soul. That explains why there are a great many habituses that have to be posited in order to account for the soul’s capacity to accomplish the diversity of acts attributed to it by medieval theologians.
Those acts can be divided into two broad categories (at least in the last quarter of the XIIIth century and the beginning of the XIVth) according to the two separate powers of the soul : acts of the will and acts of the intellect. The former are acts of love, desire and motion (mental or physical), the latter acts of reasoning, understanding, proposition formation. In ordinary cases, the soul accomplishes a first act of a certain kind (for example, it conducts a mathematical demonstration) and the corresponding habitus is simultaneously created. Then, as the act repeats itself, the habitus is reinforced in such a way that it inclines the soul ever more strongly towards its act, possibly to the point that, given certain circumstances, the act becomes automatic.
The case of the habitus of faith, corresponding to acts of believing something to be true according to God’s revelation as passed on by the Catholic church, is very specific in several ways. Indeed, faith, according to the Catholic tradition, is a virtue. As such it sact is considered to be morally good. This entails that it be free (according to most theologians and in particular for those that interest us here) in order for the believer to be deemed responsible for it. This in turn entails that this act be somehow commanded by the will, which is the only free power of the soul.
However, believing something to be true, in the broadest sense (including knowledge, etc.), can only be an act of the intellect. How then is the habitus of faith to be located in the soul ? Are there two habituses, one in the soul, the other in the intellect ? Is there only one intellectual habitus, linked to the will in some specificway ? That will be our first line of inquiry in the study of the selected authors.
The fact that faith is a virtue also entails that it be meritorious, i. e. that it allow the believer to earn eternal beatitude. This entails that the habitus of faith be supernatural and given by God. Most authors however recognize that there are or can be natural habituses of belief concerning the very same truths of faith. So, is there one habitus somehow combining natural and supernatural ? Are there two habituses, one natural, one supernatural ? This is the second question we will try to answer.
Luca Gili, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven: “Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas on the Distinction of Habits”
The reader of Aristotle's Categories may wonder whether habits should be counted among relations, or among qualities, or as an independent category. I suggest that both Albert the Great and Aquinas take habits to be the first species of quality, and, according to a different definition, an independent category. Albert's reading largely relies on Kilwardby's commentary on the Categories, and aims at presenting Aristotle's doctrine as a consistent whole. Aquinas concentrates instead on the necessity of finding a criterion to distinguish habits. He singles out the object of habit as the principles that allows us to distinguish habits among themselves. The paper will elucidate the metaphysical analysis that Aquinas undertakes to justify his claim. All accidents do not have a complete essence (cf. De ente et essentia, 6); hence, their definition always includes a reference to their subject: snubness cannot defined without mentioning the nose. This notwithstanding, the specific difference for habits is not their subject, but rather the terminus ad quem they refer to. I shall first explain why Aquinas thinks that we must posit a terminus ad quem for items, which are not relations. Secondly, I shall dwell on the reasons that lead Aquinas to think that the terminus ad quem may be taken as the criterion that distinguishes habits in their species. it will be argued that habits are related to operations, and operations are defined in virtue of their goal. Aquinas' doctrine will be confronted with Albert's treatise on the same subject, and with Aristotle's analysis of habits.
Peter Hartman, Loyola University Chicago: “Habit and Act in the Later Middle Ages”
Once Socrates has come to acquire a habit through the repeated performance of certain acts, he is then able to perform those same acts with some qualification, e.g., with more ease, with more pleasure, with more intensity, and so on. What, precisely, is the causal role of a habit with respect to such qualified acts? This question generated a great deal of debate among philosophers during the High Middle Ages (1250--1350), and in this talk I will look at several different answers that wereput forward. In particular, I will focus on the answers provided by John Duns Scotus, Godfrey of Fontaines, Durand of St.-Pourcain, and Peter Auriol.
Gyula Klima, Fordham University: “The Metaphysics of Habits in Buridan”
This paper presents John Buridan’s nominalist ontology of habits as the acquired qualities of innate powers aiding or hampering their operations, against the background of a more traditional interpretation of Aristotle’s doctrine, to be found in Boethius, Albert, Aquinas and Cajetan. The paper argues that considerations of his late Question-commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics may have forced Buridan to revise some of his earlier arguments for his parsimonious nominalist ontology of powers endorsed in such earlier works as his Questions on Aristotle’s Categories and On the Soul. The general lesson to be drawn from this investigation will seem to be that upon working out the details of a nominalist program in such widely different fields as logic, psychology and ethics, the refinements sooner or later will involve giving up at least parts of an originally “radical” program, getting it closer to what used to be the “mainstream” view. Still, even so much seems enough further down the line to change quite radically the “mainstream” view as well.
Magali Roques, Centre d’Etudes Supérieures sur la Renaissance-Topoi: “Habitus and Act According to William of Ockham”
This paper is dedicated to William of Ockham’s theory of habitus. Ockham’s epistemology has been the object of numerous studies. But the details of his cognitive psychology are not well known. In particular, his theory of habitus has never been studied since the critical edition of his works. Yet this theory is especially interesting, firstly because Ockham wrote a lot about it, secondly because he changed his mind several times about it, which is quite noticeable.
What is at stake is first a definitional question. There are many kinds of habituses, i.e. cognitive, conative and affective. But whether they share the same definition is not established, because they do not have the same function in every power of the human soul (sensitive, intellective, volitive or appetitive). Sometimes their function is to account for the easiness of some mental activities, sometimes for the very possibility of some mental phenomena, like memory and more generally every kind of cognition directed at an absent object. Since habituses are by definition not observable and since they are stipulated because of their explanatory value in the functioning of the human mind, the outcome of this could be that “habitus” is equivocal and describes various mental phenomena. Hence this definitional question is also a classificatory question.
What is also at stake is a methodological question at the heart of the very idea of cognitive psychology. The existence of habituses is deduced from observations related to mental acts. Ockham makes it clear that metaphysical presuppositions on the relation between habitus and act are necessary for this deduction. One of them is that acts of the same nature produce habituses of the same nature. Acts are the efficient cause of habituses, and in turn habituses are efficient causes of acts of the same nature. Ockham leans on his definition of causation, and more especially on his definition of an effect as what is posited if the cause is posited and what is not posited if the cause is not posited. I am pretty sure that this definition does not have any heuristic value. It does not help to find which thing is the cause of a given effect. I will try to prove that Ockham should not lean on it in order to determine the nature of habituses and the necessity of their existence, and to find out why he would think that it would work, although this cannot be so.
Jack Zupko, University of Alberta: “Acts and Dispositions in Buridan's Faculty Psychology”
John Buridan (c. 1300-61) is convinced that unless acts really differ from habits, we will be unable to draw any principled distinctions among the internal or psychic operations of living creatures. Thus, he argues that beliefs (opiniones) cannot be understood simply as diminished acts of thinking because then it would be necessary that we always attend to them, albeit weakly or partially, and there is a limit to the number of things our imperfect intellects can entertain at once. He concludes that beliefs must belong to a different species than acts of thinking (intellectiones). But this raises the problem of explaining how dispositions belonging to one species are able to cause acts belonging to another, different species. I will consider some possible solutions from Buridan’s commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, where he gives a general account of how the same subject can acquire, activate, and lose different dispositions over time.
Ian Drummond, University of Toronto: “Duns Scotus on Whether Moral Virtues Cause Moral Goodness”
In this paper, I discuss how John Duns Scotus explains the frequently quoted Aristotelian dictum “Virtue renders the agent and the act good.” I focus on distinction 17 of book 1 of his Ordinatio, where he considers whether the moral virtues have a causal role with respect to the moral goodness of the acts of a human agent.
Since Scotus agrees with most medieval philosophers that the moral virtues are habits that incline an agent to right action, I first discuss his account of what habits in general contribute to action by inclining a power. Scotus describes two possible solutions that are based on his general account of natural causation and of powers, whereby an occurrent act of a power is an accidental quality that can exist in various degrees and can be elicited with different circumstances. It is noteworthy that he does not determine the issue, but concludes only that both accounts can be defended inasmuch as each adequately explains how a habit perfects an act by increasing its intensity and by causing it to be done with greater ease, pleasure, readiness and promptness.
However, this natural perfection is possible for acts of any power, whether they are up to the agent or not, whereas moral goodness pertains to acts only insofar as they are voluntary; it must therefore be something distinct, and thus its explanation will not depend on deciding between these two accounts of habit in general. Secondly, therefore, I explain how Scotus distinguishes moral goodness from merely natural goodness. Scotus defines moral goodness as a relation of conformity between a right judgment of practical reason, in light of which a free agent is able to determine his or her own actions, and the act that is freely elicited in conformity with that judgment. Thus, while any power can have more perfect acts when it acts according to inclination, only the free acts that originate in the will can have moral goodness.
I conclude by considering what role is left for the moral virtues in Scotus’s account. Since an act is not morally good unless it is freely elicited in light of a right practical judgment and both of these acts are possible without prior inclination, the moral virtues do not have any integral role in the causation of morally good act. Nevertheless, it helpful to have them, since by definition a moral virtue will give an inclination only to acts that would be good if elicited for the right reason; however, they can give this inclination only according to their general character as habits. What then distinguishes a moral virtue from a habit that happens to incline rightly? Scotus answers this in a very tenuous fashion: just as moral goodness is the relation of conformity between a voluntary act and a dictate of right reason, so a habit of action is a moral virtue if it is somehow related to a habit of right judgment.
Nicolas Faucher, Laboratoire d’Etudes sur les Monothéismes-Ecole Pratique des Hautes Etudes: “What does a habitus of the soul do? The case of the habitus of faith in Bonaventure, Peter John Olivi and John Duns Scotus”
In medieval psychology, the notion of habitus is very commonly encountered. Indeed, a habitus is none other than a disposition to do something. It can be found in the body or in the soul of an agent and corresponds to a particular act which it is a disposition towards. In particular, the soul can accomplish acts, which implies that there are corresponding habituses inside the soul. That explains why there are a great many habituses that have to be posited in order to account for the soul’s capacity to accomplish the diversity of acts attributed to it by medieval theologians.
Those acts can be divided into two broad categories (at least in the last quarter of the XIIIth century and the beginning of the XIVth) according to the two separate powers of the soul : acts of the will and acts of the intellect. The former are acts of love, desire and motion (mental or physical), the latter acts of reasoning, understanding, proposition formation. In ordinary cases, the soul accomplishes a first act of a certain kind (for example, it conducts a mathematical demonstration) and the corresponding habitus is simultaneously created. Then, as the act repeats itself, the habitus is reinforced in such a way that it inclines the soul ever more strongly towards its act, possibly to the point that, given certain circumstances, the act becomes automatic.
The case of the habitus of faith, corresponding to acts of believing something to be true according to God’s revelation as passed on by the Catholic church, is very specific in several ways. Indeed, faith, according to the Catholic tradition, is a virtue. As such it sact is considered to be morally good. This entails that it be free (according to most theologians and in particular for those that interest us here) in order for the believer to be deemed responsible for it. This in turn entails that this act be somehow commanded by the will, which is the only free power of the soul.
However, believing something to be true, in the broadest sense (including knowledge, etc.), can only be an act of the intellect. How then is the habitus of faith to be located in the soul ? Are there two habituses, one in the soul, the other in the intellect ? Is there only one intellectual habitus, linked to the will in some specificway ? That will be our first line of inquiry in the study of the selected authors.
The fact that faith is a virtue also entails that it be meritorious, i. e. that it allow the believer to earn eternal beatitude. This entails that the habitus of faith be supernatural and given by God. Most authors however recognize that there are or can be natural habituses of belief concerning the very same truths of faith. So, is there one habitus somehow combining natural and supernatural ? Are there two habituses, one natural, one supernatural ? This is the second question we will try to answer.
Luca Gili, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven: “Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas on the Distinction of Habits”
The reader of Aristotle's Categories may wonder whether habits should be counted among relations, or among qualities, or as an independent category. I suggest that both Albert the Great and Aquinas take habits to be the first species of quality, and, according to a different definition, an independent category. Albert's reading largely relies on Kilwardby's commentary on the Categories, and aims at presenting Aristotle's doctrine as a consistent whole. Aquinas concentrates instead on the necessity of finding a criterion to distinguish habits. He singles out the object of habit as the principles that allows us to distinguish habits among themselves. The paper will elucidate the metaphysical analysis that Aquinas undertakes to justify his claim. All accidents do not have a complete essence (cf. De ente et essentia, 6); hence, their definition always includes a reference to their subject: snubness cannot defined without mentioning the nose. This notwithstanding, the specific difference for habits is not their subject, but rather the terminus ad quem they refer to. I shall first explain why Aquinas thinks that we must posit a terminus ad quem for items, which are not relations. Secondly, I shall dwell on the reasons that lead Aquinas to think that the terminus ad quem may be taken as the criterion that distinguishes habits in their species. it will be argued that habits are related to operations, and operations are defined in virtue of their goal. Aquinas' doctrine will be confronted with Albert's treatise on the same subject, and with Aristotle's analysis of habits.
Peter Hartman, Loyola University Chicago: “Habit and Act in the Later Middle Ages”
Once Socrates has come to acquire a habit through the repeated performance of certain acts, he is then able to perform those same acts with some qualification, e.g., with more ease, with more pleasure, with more intensity, and so on. What, precisely, is the causal role of a habit with respect to such qualified acts? This question generated a great deal of debate among philosophers during the High Middle Ages (1250--1350), and in this talk I will look at several different answers that wereput forward. In particular, I will focus on the answers provided by John Duns Scotus, Godfrey of Fontaines, Durand of St.-Pourcain, and Peter Auriol.
Gyula Klima, Fordham University: “The Metaphysics of Habits in Buridan”
This paper presents John Buridan’s nominalist ontology of habits as the acquired qualities of innate powers aiding or hampering their operations, against the background of a more traditional interpretation of Aristotle’s doctrine, to be found in Boethius, Albert, Aquinas and Cajetan. The paper argues that considerations of his late Question-commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics may have forced Buridan to revise some of his earlier arguments for his parsimonious nominalist ontology of powers endorsed in such earlier works as his Questions on Aristotle’s Categories and On the Soul. The general lesson to be drawn from this investigation will seem to be that upon working out the details of a nominalist program in such widely different fields as logic, psychology and ethics, the refinements sooner or later will involve giving up at least parts of an originally “radical” program, getting it closer to what used to be the “mainstream” view. Still, even so much seems enough further down the line to change quite radically the “mainstream” view as well.
Magali Roques, Centre d’Etudes Supérieures sur la Renaissance-Topoi: “Habitus and Act According to William of Ockham”
This paper is dedicated to William of Ockham’s theory of habitus. Ockham’s epistemology has been the object of numerous studies. But the details of his cognitive psychology are not well known. In particular, his theory of habitus has never been studied since the critical edition of his works. Yet this theory is especially interesting, firstly because Ockham wrote a lot about it, secondly because he changed his mind several times about it, which is quite noticeable.
What is at stake is first a definitional question. There are many kinds of habituses, i.e. cognitive, conative and affective. But whether they share the same definition is not established, because they do not have the same function in every power of the human soul (sensitive, intellective, volitive or appetitive). Sometimes their function is to account for the easiness of some mental activities, sometimes for the very possibility of some mental phenomena, like memory and more generally every kind of cognition directed at an absent object. Since habituses are by definition not observable and since they are stipulated because of their explanatory value in the functioning of the human mind, the outcome of this could be that “habitus” is equivocal and describes various mental phenomena. Hence this definitional question is also a classificatory question.
What is also at stake is a methodological question at the heart of the very idea of cognitive psychology. The existence of habituses is deduced from observations related to mental acts. Ockham makes it clear that metaphysical presuppositions on the relation between habitus and act are necessary for this deduction. One of them is that acts of the same nature produce habituses of the same nature. Acts are the efficient cause of habituses, and in turn habituses are efficient causes of acts of the same nature. Ockham leans on his definition of causation, and more especially on his definition of an effect as what is posited if the cause is posited and what is not posited if the cause is not posited. I am pretty sure that this definition does not have any heuristic value. It does not help to find which thing is the cause of a given effect. I will try to prove that Ockham should not lean on it in order to determine the nature of habituses and the necessity of their existence, and to find out why he would think that it would work, although this cannot be so.
Jack Zupko, University of Alberta: “Acts and Dispositions in Buridan's Faculty Psychology”
John Buridan (c. 1300-61) is convinced that unless acts really differ from habits, we will be unable to draw any principled distinctions among the internal or psychic operations of living creatures. Thus, he argues that beliefs (opiniones) cannot be understood simply as diminished acts of thinking because then it would be necessary that we always attend to them, albeit weakly or partially, and there is a limit to the number of things our imperfect intellects can entertain at once. He concludes that beliefs must belong to a different species than acts of thinking (intellectiones). But this raises the problem of explaining how dispositions belonging to one species are able to cause acts belonging to another, different species. I will consider some possible solutions from Buridan’s commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, where he gives a general account of how the same subject can acquire, activate, and lose different dispositions over time.