Daniel J. Simpson

Medieval scholastics share a commitment to a substance-accident ontology and to an analysis of efficient causation in which agents act in virtue of their powers. Given these commitments, it seems ready-made which entities are the agents or powers: substances are agents and their accidents powers. William of Ockham, however, offers a rather different analysis concerning material substances and their essential powers, which this article explores. The article first examines Ockham’s account of propria and his reasons for claiming that a material substance is essentially powerful sine accidentibus. However, the article subsequently argues that, given Ockham’s reductionism about material substance, only substantial forms – never substances – are truly agents and powers. Thus, a material substance is essentially powerful but only by courtesy – per accidens, as Ockham calls it – because it has a non-identical part, its substantial form, which does all the causal work by itself, per se.

Can a work of art be defective aesthetically as art because it is defective morally? Étienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain both develop Thomistic accounts of the arts based on Aquinas’s distinction between the virtues of art and prudence, but they answer this question differently. Although their answers diverge, I will argue that both accounts make a crucial assumption about the metaphysics of goodness that Aquinas denies: that moral and aesthetic goodness are distinct species, not inseparable modes, of metaphysical goodness. I propose a new way to develop a Thomistic account of the arts that begins with Aquinas’s treatment of the three inseparable modes of metaphysical goodness: the virtuous, the useful, and the pleasant. This foundation seems metaphysically, methodologically, and explanatorily prior to the accounts of Gilson and Maritain, because art is a virtue, and virtue is related to goodness, and goodness is “divided” into three inseparable modes.