Thomas M. Osborne

Alasdair MacIntyre’s criticism of contemporary politics rests in large part on the way in which the political communities of advanced modernity do not recognize common goals and practices. I shall argue that although MacIntyre explicitly recognizes the influence of Jacques Maritain on his own thought, MacIntyre’s own views are incompatible not only with Maritain’s attempt to develop a Thomistic theory which is compatible with liberal democracy, but also relies on a view of the individual as a part which is related to the whole in a way that is incompatible with Maritain’s understanding of the spiritual individual or person

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.1 (2002) 119-121 [Access article in PDF] Book Review Ethics and Political Philosophy The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought Arthur Stephen McGrade, John Kilcullen, and Matthew Kempshall, editors. Ethics and Political Philosophy. Vol. 2 of The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Pp. xii + 664. Cloth, $85.00. Paper, $29.95. M. S. Kempshall. The Common Good in Late Medieval Political Thought. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pp. x + 401. Cloth, $95.00. With the exception of the thought of Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus, late medieval political and ethical philosophy has been neglected. Two recent books attempt to rectify this neglect. One is the second volume of The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts. A translator of this volume, Matthew Kempshall, has also recently written a thorough analysis of the common good as it is discussed in late thirteenth-century scholasticism. Many of the texts discussed in this second book are translated by Kempshall in the first book.The new volume of translations now makes it possible for the reader unfamiliar with Latin to have some exposure to the medieval reception of Aristotle's ethical and political thought. The selections are deliberately taken from lesser-known figures who are not often translated, such as Albert the Great, Godfrey of Fontaines, and Augustine of Ancona. The selections are carefully chosen to represent a wide variety of literary genres. For example, the selection from Albert is part of his commentary of Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, [End Page 119] whereas the selection from Godfrey is a Quodlibetal Question, and that from Augustine of Ancona is part of a treatise. Moreover, there are some selections that show developments within a particular genre. For example, a translation from Buridan's commentary on Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics contrasts nicely with that of Albert. The selection from Albert focuses mostly on pleasure, the relationship between the active and the contemplative lives, and the connection between ethics and politics. His discussion of pleasure is philosophically important in light of twentieth-century discussions about reasons for actions. Moreover, these issues are all discussed in at least one of the other selections. Interestingly, Buridan's commentary on the same Book focuses instead on human freedom. Buridan makes fine distinctions that are relevant to contemporary debates about free will. Selections from Henry of Ghent, Godfrey of Fontaines, and James of Viterbo all address the topic of the relationship between self-love and the virtuous life. These passages are relevant to the question of whether there is egoism in ancient and medieval ethical thought.The volume is a companion to The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy and suffers from one of its weaknesses, which is that the selections can seem arbitrary. For example, the passage from Albert takes up nearly one quarter of the volume. Furthermore, sometimes the representation of an author by only one genre is misleading. For example, although Giles of Rome wrote a Quodlibetal Question (Quod 2, q. 20) that is directly attacked in a translation from James of Viterbo, Giles is represented only by a passage from his treatise De regimine principum. Moreover, the moral psychology of the late thirteenth century is not well-covered, which is odd considering the importance of Bonnie Kent's work in this area.One additional problem is that there are few notes to aid the reader. Sometimes the translations can be confusing. For example, in one passage "the Commentator" should be identified, since the name can apply to at least three individuals (262-3). More seriously, readers with little background in medieval thought might confuse the medieval referents signified in the translation by the words "state" or "love" with contemporary referents. The translations themselves are clear and the different translators follow a consistent set of guidelines. Anyone who tries to translate some of these passages for herself will understand that some...

Although Giles of Rome, Henry of Ghent, and Godfrey of Fontaines disagree with each other profoundly over the relationship between the intellect and the will, they all think that someone who sees God must also love him in the ordinary course of events. However, Godfrey rejects a central thesis argued for by both Henry and Giles, namely that by God’s absolute power there could be such vision without love. The debate is not about the ability to freely reject or at least refrain from willing complete happiness, but about the connection between the known object and the will’s act. Godfrey’s discussion is an occasion for him to criticize Giles’ idiosyncratic view that an elicited act of love for the known object is necessary for every act of knowing, and Henry’s development of the view that the known object is merely a sine qua non cause of an act of love. In his response, Godfrey defends a thesis that later becomes widespread, namely that the known object is an efficient cause of love.

In this article I argue against some contemporary scholars that Thomas Aquinas holds that grace is in some way necessary for the perfection of even natural virtue, due to original sin. First I show that healing grace is necessary for the fulfillment of ordinary natural moral duties. On account of original sin, human cannot fulfill the precept to naturally love God without healing grace. Moreover, they cannot avoid committing some acts (mortal sins) whereby they are turned away from God. Second, I argue that without grace someone cannot acquire the political virtues (acquired moral virtues) that make the agent good even on a natural level, and are connected with each other through prudence.

Thomas discusses the referral of acts to the ultimate end unsystematically and in diverse texts. These texts are interesting in that they raise difficult questions. For example, on Thomas’s view there can be a disparity between the moral value of the act and that of the ultimate end. But what does he mean when he claims that venial sins may be habitually referred to God as the supernatural ultimate end? Moreover, he claims both that every good is desired for the sake of the ultimate end and that bad agents can perform good actions. How are these two statements compatible? These texts raise additional questions about the connection between the natural and supernatural ends. If, as Thomas states, unbelievers can perform good actions, is there a sense in which unbelievers can order their acts to God as a purely natural ultimate end?

The distinctions between the different sense of "perfect" and "imperfect" virtue are essential for understanding Thomas’ view of the development of and connection between the virtues. In this article I set out a fairly traditional schema of the states of virtue and shown how they are found in Thomas’ own texts. An understanding of the distinction between imperfect and perfect acquired virtue is necessary in order to grasp the issue at stake in my previous article on the Augustianism of Thomas Aquinas's Moral Theory: “The question is whether without grace someone can be good by the fact that he has acquired virtues that are perfect – that is, connected with the other virtues through prudence.”

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 63.1 (2002) 63-82 [Access article in PDF] Faith, Philosophy, and the Nominalist Background to Luther's Defense of the Real Presence Thomas Osborne Recent scholarship has brought into question the traditional interpretation of Luther as being hostile towards philosophy. 1 Graham White claims that Luther holds a place in the history of logic as a member of the Nominalist tradition. 2 Bruce D. Marshall argues that Luther and Thomas Aquinas fundamentally agree on the relationship between faith and reason. 3 Both scholars recognize that Luther himself stressed the importance of logic and used late medieval philosophical techniques. Although I agree with this scholarship that Luther's thought must not be understood in isolation from late medieval thought, I will argue that Luther uses philosophical ideas in a way which conflicts with that of the scholastic tradition. The focus here is on Luther's understanding of the relationship between faith and reason in the context of Luther's controversy over the Eucharist with the Swiss sacramentarians, among whom Zwingli and Oecolampadius were the most prominent. 4 Although Luther uses philosophical [End Page 63] distinctions to argue against what he thinks are misinterpretations of the Bible, he does not in any explicit and systematic way use philosophy to arrive at a theological understanding of the Eucharist. Luther differs from his scholastic predecessors in that he uses philosophy not to develop theological conclusions but only to attack errors about the Bible, and so the concern here is with Luther's use of Nominalist doctrines about presence in his attack on the sacra-mentarians' belief that Christ cannot be present both at the right hand of God and in the Eucharist at the same time.In his discussion of the Eucharistic doctrine which is presented in The Babylonian Captivity of the Church (1520), Luther not only argues against the Catholic doctrine of the Eucharistic sacrifice but also against transubstantiation. 5 Luther explicitly states that he was influenced on this issue by Peter D'Ailly, a Nominalist follower of William of Ockham. D'Ailly and other Nominalists thought that transubstantiation was not the only possible way that Christ could be present in the Eucharist, since if God wished he could also make Christ present along with the substance of the bread and wine. 6 From a Nominalist [End Page 64] perspective transubstantiation requires two actions of God, namely, the annihilation of the substance of the bread and the placement of Christ's body under the species. Therefore, consubstantiation would be a simpler account of Christ's Eucharistic presence. If Christ's body were present along with the substance of the bread annihilation would not have to occur. But D'Ailly and the Nominalists argue that we know from Church authority that the real presence occurs through transubstantiation. On this issue the Nominalists differ from Thomas Aquinas, who gives philosophically-based arguments against consubstantiation. 7 When Luther attacks Thomas, he attacks not so much the use of philosophy in theology as Thomas's philosophy: "But this opinion of Thomas hangs so completely in the air without support of Scripture or reason that it seems to me he knows neither his philosophy nor his dialectic." 8Since the Nominalist belief in transubstantiation rather than consubstantiation rests on an acceptance of Church authority, the rejection of such authority would seem to lead to a rejection of transubstantiation. If Luther had assented to traditional Nominalist theology with the sole exception of its reliance on Church authority, one would expect him to argue for the necessity of consubstantiation. However, Luther sees himself as rejecting an unnecessarily philosophical theology in a return to a more biblical faith. 9 Luther claims that he argues for a particular understanding of the Eucharistic presence but rather "that every one may feel at liberty to ponder, hold, and believe either one view or the other without endangering his salvation." 10 Although Luther's training in Nominalist theology leads him to think that consubstantiation is possible, he at no point argues that a belief...

Although this thesis is denied by much recent scholarship, Ockham holds that the ultimate ground of a moral judgement's truth is a divine command, rather than natural or non-natural properties. God could assign a different moral value not only to every exterior act, but also to loving God. Ockham does allow that someone who has not had access to revelation can make correct moral judgements. Although her right reason dictates what God in fact commands, she need not know that God so commands. Ockham's divine-command theory plays an important role in the shift away from a nature-based ethics, and it anticipates contemporary problems concerning truth in meta-ethics.

Thomas claims that a human act is specified both by the object and the end, and that the exterior act is the interior act’s object. These claims are best understood in light of the De Malo’s explicit mature teaching that the exterior act can be essentially good or bad, and that it is both the proximate end and the object of the interior act. Since the interior act wills the end, it wills the apprehended exterior act as the formality under which the whole act is willed. The interior and exterior acts do not form the one human act merely as cause and effect, but also as matter and form. These clarifications explain some problematic texts in the Summa Theologiae.

Although Thomas, Scotus, and Ockham are all broadly Aristotelian, their different Aristotelian accounts reflect underlying disagreements in these three areas. These trends may represent a shift from an earlier to a later medieval intellectual culture, but they also reflect views that continued to exist in different schools. Thomists continued to exist alongside Scotists through the end of the eighteenth century, and Ockham’s views had a more varied but continued influence through the modern period. The different views of Thomas, Scotus, and Ockham are not only in themselves plausible attempts at understanding human action, but they formed the background to late medieval and early modern descriptions of human action.

This dissertation uses the context of the thirteenth-century debate about the natural love of God over self to clarify the difference between the ethical system of Thomas Aquinas and that of John Duns Scotus. Although Thomas and Scotus both believe that such love is possible, they disagree about the reasons for this position. ;Early thirteenth-century thinkers, such as William of Auxerre and Philip the Chancellor, were the first to distinguish between a natural love of God and charity, which is a love assisted by grace. Thomas Aquinas' approach to the issue is original. According to Thomas, since human beings are part of a political whole and also part of a whole whose good is God, it follows that they have a natural inclination to love the common good and God more than themselves. Although Thomas' position and his corresponding interpretation of Aristotle were upheld by Godfrey of Fontaines and Giles of Rome, it was severely criticized by James of Viterbo, who argued that the part always seeks its own good. ;John Duns Scotus makes the same criticism of the part/whole argument, although Scotus emphasizes that the human will is free to act against the natural inclination for self-perfection. Scotus clearly distinguishes between the will and nature. ;The conclusion of the dissertation argues that the debate prefigures the modern shift sway from an ethics based upon natural inclination along with the modern tendency to understand morality as a limitation of self-interest. Moreover, it is argued that modern Thomists need to take into account Thomas' original emphasis on natural inclination and the priority of the common good

The distinction between Thomas and Scotus on threefold referral is superficially similar in that both use the same terminology of actual, virtual, and habitual referral. For Scotus, an act is virtually referred to the ultimate end through an agent’s somehow explicitly thinking about the end and some sort of causal connection between the virtually intended act and the actually intended act. For Thomas, someone with charity virtually refers his acts to God as the ultimate end not because the act has been caused by an actually intended act, but because the act is the kind of act that can be referred to God as the ultimate end, and the agent himself is ordered to that end. Similarly, For Scotus a good act might be only habitually referred to God because the agent does not think about him. For Thomas, the fact that someone with charity would only habitually order an act to God can only be explained by a defect in the act. The act lacks a virtual order to God because it is the kind of act which cannot be so ordered. The difference between Scotus and Thomas on this issue expresses a fundamental difference over the relationship between individual acts and the ultimate end. For Thomas, every good act is orderable and this order is made virtual merely by an agent’s possession of charity. The virtual order requires an actually ordered act only to the extent that the possession of charity does. For Scotus, the order requires some sort of additional act by the agent.

In his discussion of how future contingents are known and revealed Thomas systematized what Augustine had developed in his disputes with the Stoics and Pelagians. Thomas shows how logical determinism concerning future contingents is avoided by Aristotelian logic, according to which future contingents have no determinate truth. Moreover, he explicitly unravels how our understanding of causal contingency and necessity is applicable only to created causes. Nevertheless, Augustine had explicitly done the same when he criticized the Stoics not for their position that every event is ordered, but rather for not recognizing that this order must include God’s causal power. Moreover, Augustine’s discussion of God’s promise to Abraham stresses that only God can move the will without taking away its freedom. The truth of the promise is based on the truth of what God will do. Similarly, Thomas stresses that knowledge of future contingents can only be prophetic, since they are present only in God and have determinate truth only on account of his decision to cause them. Augustine did not go into detail concerning how future truths are usually known insofar as they are present in their causes, but Thomas’ position is compatible with that of Augustine and may go some way towards explaining its deeper philosophical implications. The similarity of Thomas and Augustine on the problem of prophecy and foreknowledge is an instance of how Thomas often agrees with Augustine on substance, even though he expresses his view in a more systematic and precise fashion. The most relevant texts of Augustine on this issue are polemical. There is even development in Augustine, as he moves from his relatively simple concerns about necessity in the De libero arbitrio to the more sophisticated treatments in the Ad Simplicianum, the De civitate dei and the anti-Pelagian writings. Thomas’ texts are scholastic. Consequently, he is able to discuss one topic at length and to use conceptual resources borrowed or developed from Aristotle. Nevertheless, there is no reason to conclude that Thomas’ development of these themes betrays Augustine any more than Augustine’s own development betrays his earlier writings. On this issue Thomas is truly Augustinian.

Although Elizabeth Anscombe’s work on causation is frequently cited and anthologized, her main arguments have been ignored or misunderstood as havingtheir basis in quantum mechanics or a particular theory of perception. I examine her main arguments and show that they not only work against the Humean causaltheories of her time, but also against contemporary attempts to analyze causation in terms of laws and causal properties. She shows that our ordinary usage does not connect causation with laws, and suggests that philosophers emphasize laws for mostly historical reasons. Moreover, she argues that the core of causation is derivativeness, which is as neglected now as when she wrote. Her focus on derivativeness indicates to us how we can both avoid the position that the causal “because” is truth-functional and yet still hold that causal statements are really explanatory.

My argument has three parts. In the first, I shall explain some key Thomist distinctions concerning necessity and premotion. In the second, I shall argue that many philosophers who object to the Thomist position misconstrue the relevant understanding of necessity and contingency. In the third, I shall focus directly on their denial that the doctrine of premotion is helpful for discussions of how God moves the human will. The first two sections illustrate that the Thomists think plausibly that our understanding of necessity is connected either with a logical necessity or secondary causality. Consequently, in order to show that the will is free, they argue that human actions are necessitated neither logically nor by secondary causes. In the third section, I argue that Thomists do not simply beg the question by asserting that God’s predetermining decrees are compatible with human freedom. They have an understanding of God’s causation which allows both for God’s infallible motion and the contingency of many created events, among which are free human actions.

This book treats the thirteenth-century debate concerning the natural love of God over self with an eye to how the thinkers of this period saw the connection between one's own good and the aims of virtuous action. It shows that the main difference in this debate reflects a fundamental contrast between Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus over the importance of natural inclination in Ethics and the priority of the common good. It indicates how medieval thinkers attempted to reconcile eudaimonism with the claim that everyone must love the common good more than themselves. It considers perhaps the most crucial issue in the thirteenth-century reception of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics. It also indicates how later theories that separate morality from self-interest have their origins in concepts that were created in earlier debates, such as this one.