Jean-Luc Solere

I first explain the scholastic (Scotist) thesis on the independence of essences Bayle alludes to in the passage of the Continuation des Pensée Diverses where he presents the Stratonicians' and the Chinese philosophers' retorsion. Then, I show that this retorsion applies to the argument of the existence of God based on "aseity", but not to the occasionalist argument based on the "quod nescis" principle. I conclude that materialism (the "Stratonician hypothesis") cannot be, for Bayle, a satisfying system.

In this paper, I examine the problem of Bayle's skepticism. I show that he is not a wholesale skeptic. Rather, he thinks that reason is plagued by internal conflicts. But its principles, which clash with each other, can be adopted separately from each other. It is often what we have to do when dealing with metaphysical problems. This also entails that reason is not to be rejected as a whole when it happens to be contradicted by faith; only some of its principles have to be denied, and solely in that case. Further, Bayle believes that we possess absolute certainly in our knowledge of ethical principles. I show how this is compatible with his relativism in other domains by putting back his contention in the context of Reformed thought.

The medieval notion of instrumental cause is not limited to what we call today “instruments” or “tools.” It extends way beyond the realm of technology and includes natural entities, for instance, the accidents by which a substance acts on another substance, sensible species in the air acting on a visual faculty, sacraments, bodily organs, and sometimes creatures with respect to God’s action. In all these cases, instrumental causes, like secondary causes in general, are subordinated to a principal cause and contribute to its action and effects. However, the manner in which they do so makes them different from regular secondary causes, and the specifics are not easy to pinpoint. At the occasion of discussions about creation ex nihilo and sacraments, John Duns Scotus challenges Thomas Aquinas’s theory of instrumental causality. Whereas Aquinas does not strongly distinguish between artifacts and natural agents, and postulates a complex superposition of layers of causation, Scotus offers a novel view that clearly separates artificial instrumentality and natural instrumentality, and in both cases explains causation with great economy. Scotus’s in-depth discussion has far-reaching implications. It completely transforms the understanding of instrumental causality in general.

According to the Dominican Thomas of Sutton, the reception of intelligible species in the potential intellect is in every point similar to the actualization of forms in matter, which means that the potential intellect remains completely passive through the whole process of concept acquisition. However, Sutton adds that when the intelligible species are stored in the memory and aggregate in logically organized clusters, thus becoming intellectual habitus, they have a way of being that is not found in material things, namely, incomplete actuality. Without being properly speaking efficient causes of mental processes, they spontaneously tend to emerge by themselves into the light of awareness—even though other elements may in fact block them. This special sort of self-actualization is compatible, Sutton thinks, with the passivity he ascribes to the potential intellect.

This paper explores the origins of the term "causa sine qua non" used by Durand de Saint-Pourçain to describe the role of material things in knowledge. I show that its technical meaning comes from the Stoics and was transmitted to the Middle Ages by Boethius' commentary on Cicero's Topics. The expression "sine qua non" here does not have the ordinary and restricted meaning of "indispensable", "necessary condition", which can also apply to direct, per se causes of an effect. In the present context, sine qua non causes do not act on the effect in question, either as concomitant, secondary, or instrumental causes, or as remote causes. They act only on that which hinders the actualization of a potentiality, in order to remove that obstacle. For example, the removal of a support that prevented something from falling does not act on that thing, nor does it add anything to its tendency to fall; it simply enables that thing to exercise its own actualization. Similarly, in cognitive processes, external things do not impose anything on the soul, but simply give it the opportunity to actualize its faculties of its own accord. I situate Durand's use of this form of causality in the context of late 13th/early 14th century theories of cognition, among several other attempts to find an alternative theory to the standard Aristotelian model and to maintain the pure activity of the soul with respect to the body.

Due to his innatist theory, James of Viterbo brings original answers to a number of late-thirteenth century questions concerning cognition. While he maintains a certain distinction between the soul and its faculties, and among these faculties, he rejects the Aristotelian distinction between agent and patient intellects. Thanks to its predispositions to knowing, the mind is able to be an agent for itself. Correlatively, James rejects the usual conception of abstraction. Neither does the intellect act on the phantasms, nor the phantasms on the intellect. The intellect simply actualizes a conceptual scheme at the occasion of adequate sensory representations. Since the innate predispositions are the intrinsic principles of cognitive acts, James maintains with Giles of Rome the notion of intelligible species. But he agrees with Godfrey of Fontaines that an act of intellection is nothing else than the fully actualized species itself. He also concedes to Henry of Ghent that the form of an intelligible object need not be ontologically received in the intellect, but can just have an “objective” presence. Finally, thanks again to his theory of predispositions, he has an easy solution to the vexed problems of the knowledge of substance essences and of the self.

James of Viterbio is one of the rare medieval authors to sustain a thoroughly innatist philosophy. He borrows from Simplicius the notion of idoneitas (aptitude, predisposition) so as to ground a cognition theory in which external things are not the efficient and formal causes of mental acts. A predisposition has the characteristic of being halfway between potentiality and actuality. Therefore, the subject that has predispositions does not need to be acted upon by another thing to actualize them. External things only “incline” the mind to make use of a stock of cognitive schemes. Consequently, in order to avoid an infinite regress James must adopt innatism. Following the lead of late Neoplatonism, he goes as far as including, not only conceptual schemes, but also perceptual schemes among the inbuilt stock. As a result, James’s theory, while it echoes certain preoccupations and themes that are common in the thirteenth century, proves to be one of a kind.

Les textes reunis dans ce volume visent a combler une importante lacune : l'absence d'etude d'ampleur consacree specifiquement aux relations entre Pierre Bayle et Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, permettant d'evaluer l'influence qu'ils ont exercee l'un sur l'autre, par leurs ecrits et leurs echanges, directs et indirects.Le but est de confronter ces deux philosophes majeurs du XVIIe siecle, en cherchant a depasser l'opposition reductrice entre scepticisme d'un cote et rationalisme dogmatique de l'autre. L'etude de leurs rapports montre les differentes etapes et la fecondite de leurs echanges : d'abord autour de la critique de la physique de Descartes, ensuite a propos du « systeme de l'harmonie preetablie » defendu par Leibniz mais critique par Bayle dans son Dictionnaire historique et critique, enfin au sujet du rapport entre foi et raison, du probleme du mal et de la justification de Dieu.

The problem of the intensification and remission of qualities was a crux for philosophical, theological, and scientific thought in the Middle Ages. It was raised in Antiquity with this remark of Aristotle: some qualities, as accidental beings, admit the more and the less. Admitting more and less is not a trivial property, since it belongs neither to every category of being, nor to every quality. Rather it applies only to states and dispositions such as virtue, to affections of bodies such as heat and sweetness, and to affections of soul such as anger. However, the property of admitting more and less was a matter of importance for the qualitative physics that had reigned up to about the time of Descartes, a physics which was concerned with concepts such as heat, coldness, lightness, heaviness, and so on.

The problem of the limitations of or conditions for God's power was one of the most fruitful topics in medieval discussions. While debating it, medieval thinkers came to redefine the concept of the "possible." William of Auxerre's disputed questions offer an example of critical reexamination of Aristotle's conception of possibility. Parallel to the account of William's views on the topic, the article provides (from a formal point of view, so to speak) an analysis of the sequence and formulation of the questions he raises, in an attempt to propose a method for reading these frequently disconcerting texts.