Okay. I have elected to start with chapter 3.
Chapters 1 & 2 get us back into the medieval period, Abelard and others, and some logical work.
You're more than welcome to read those, but I want to begin with chapter 3.
Because Chapter 3 really begins us, “The Road to Skepticism,” with the patterns in
late medieval thought, especially 14th century thought, Ockham, that are going to be the
origin of the environment in which Descartes emerges then, later on in the in the 17th century.
So we see that Gilson begins chapter 3 by praising Thomas Aquinas, extolling his virtues,
his modesty, the modesty of his intellectual method and his conclusions.
Gilson is a Thomist of a certain variety, with strong attention to the history of philosophy.
Some of you know him by reputation as being a history of philosophy scholar.
Two things he notes here on the very first page: that in addition to his modesty, Aquinas
has the virtue of not mixing his theology with his philosophy.
He keeps the principles of theology separate from the principles of his philosophy, one
a natural discipline, the other a supernatural discipline.
But one of the themes we will see throughout Gilson’s work is his emphasis on not mixing
methods between sciences.
If one attempts to do philosophy using the principles of theology, one will make mistakes.
If one attempts to do theology using the principles of philosophy or psychology or any other science,
one will similarly make mistakes.
And so Gilson is emphasizing, as it were, the kind of discrete methods that are appropriate
to each field of study.
As we’ll see, one of his criticisms of Ockham in this chapter is that Ockham takes a theological
principle about God's omnipotence and makes it answer philosophical questions in his system.
According to Gilson, this is always going to be an error.
In fact it might be the characteristic error of the views he criticizes, going through
Kant, through Descartes, through the different philosophers dealt with in the other chapters
of this book.
So, the first thing to note.
Page 50: “Himself a theologian, St. Thomas had asked the professors of theology never
to prove an article of faith by rational demonstration, for faith is not based on reason, but on the
word of God, and if you try to prove it, you destroy it.”
So we have the separation between the philosophical and the theological in Thomas.
This is the source of virtue and praise from Gilson.
Now let's take a look at what's going on with William of Ockham.
William of Ockham, 14th century, English, perhaps takes part in that sort of empirical
oriented national character.
Also a Franciscan, later in his life excommunicated; that didn't hamper his scholarly career much.
William of Ockham, if some of you have read Umberto Eco’s “The Name of the Rose,”
or seen the movie starring Sean Connery, the protagonist of that book, a sort of Franciscan
monk-friar-detective, solving a murder mystery in the monastery, is based on William of Ockham.
And some of you of course know of Ockham’s Razor, a principle of parsimony in explanation,
which I don't think comes directly from Ockham, but takes part in the spirit of his thought.
Ockham, the most important thing about Ockham, I think, is at the bottom of page 50, that
Ockham emphasizes the first article of the Christian Creed above all else: “I believe
in God Almighty.”
So it's the omnipotence of God, the power of God that is going to receive the primary
emphasis in the philosophical thought of Ockham.
And the Logos of God is going to receive, we might say, a kind of secondary emphasis.
For Ockham it really all comes back to: God possesses *all the power*.
There is literally nothing that is more powerful than God, there is nothing powerful enough
to set limits to God, and if you begin to speak of the divine Logos in a way that suggests
that it limits the effective power of God's will, Ockham is going to blow the whistle,
throw the red flag on that play.
That's not a legitimate way of thinking about God.
It compromises and limits the power of God.
Those of you who've read Pope Benedict's “Regensburg Address” might recollect that in that he
talks a great deal about the relation between God's logos and God's power.
That might be a good text for us to come to, perhaps later in the semester.
Here, looking at one reason that you get such attention is because in Ockham and then also
in other religious traditions, particularly in some varieties of Islam, the power of God
takes on this kind of overshadowing character over all the other predicates of God, all
the other ways of knowing God that one might have.
As the first study question I've given indicates: in some sense all of Ockham’s philosophy
is distorted by this decision to place full weight on the power of God as opposed to the
logos of God.
We can sort of classify different systems of theologies and different philosophical
approaches to God according to which predicate of God they make primary.
In addition to emphasizing God's omnipotence to perhaps the neglect of His logos, we find
also in Ockham the mixture of theology, theological and philosophical principles.
At the top of page 51 Gilson says…
Bottom of 50: “…Ockham [did not] use it as a principle
in theology, which [would be] very proper…, but he also resorted to [using] it in discussing
various philosophical problems, as if any theological dogma, held by faith alone, could
become the source of philosophical and… rational conclusions.”
So we have this error of mixing methods again, expecting a philosophic, a theological principle
to solve a philosophical problem.
Like Ghostbusters: crossing the streams, don't do that, you're in danger of bringing the
world to an end.
What was Occam's philosophy?
I want to take a close look at this, because what he says in the pages that follow is that
there's no fundamental different, no difference in the fundamental position, between Ockham
and others, other philosophers, but there's a vast difference in their ultimate conclusions.
So there's something going wrong in the way that Ockham is reasoning about individuals
and universals, and our goal I think, for the next four or five pages, is to find this distinction.
So my third question on the reading sheet: Contrast Duns Scotus, Thomas Aquinas,
and Harclay on the reality of universals…
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