Magali Elise Roques

It has become a commonly held view that Ockham does not defend a reductionist account of efficient causality, and that for him causal powers cannot be eliminated from causal statements. This paper argues that this reading can be refined, and that according to Ockham the analysis of causality can go one step further. In reaction to Scotus’s concept of essentially ordered causes, Ockham claims that a relation of “essential dependence” holds between a total cause and its effect. I argue for a reading of this relation in counterfactual terms. If this reading is correct, Ockham’s account is close in spirit to the “neo-Humean” account of causality defended by David Lewis, according to which efficient causality is counterfactual dependence plus restrictive clauses concerning cases of counterfactual dependence that are not causal and cases of redundant causation. From this viewpoint, Ockham’s view is close in spirit to the positivist conception of metaphysics that was prevalent before the “neo-Aristotelian” turn in metaphysics.

This volume examines the conceptions of non-causal explanations (also called grounding claims) that were developed by philosophers and theologians working in the Aristotelian tradition from the Middle Ages onward. A distinctive feature of medieval models of explanation is that they predate the divide between explanations in the humanities and social sciences and explanations in the natural sciences (e.g. physics, chemistry, and biology) that has become central in the theory of explanation in the modern period. For Aristotle, there are several types of causal explanation, but all correct explanations are causal. Causal explanations are used in very different disciplines, ranging from theology to physics to ethics and politics. Medieval theologians and philosophers, however, adopted a pluralist model of explanation. They accepted that some forms of non-causal explanation are valid, such as the account of the Trinitarian relationships, as well as mathematical proofs, explanations of human behaviour, and the validity of logical consequences. This volume gathers studies that examine the core philosophical assumptions, motivations, and concepts that lie behind the acceptance of non-causal forms of explanation in the medieval period.

Since antiquity, philosophers have investigated how change works. If a thing moves from one state to another, when exactly does it start to be in its new state, and when does it cease to be in its former one? In the late Middle Ages, the "problem of the instant of change" was subject to considerable debate and gave rise to sophisticated theories; it became popular and controversial again in the second half of the twentieth century. The studies collected here constitute the first attempt at tackling the different aspects of an issue that, until now have been the object of seminal but isolated forays. They do so in through a historical perspective, offering both the medieval and the contemporary viewpoints.

This edited volume presents new lines of research dealing with the language of thought and its philosophical implications in the time of Ockham. It features more than 20 essays that also serve as a tribute to the ground-breaking work of a leading expert in late medieval philosophy: Claude Panaccio. Coverage addresses topics in the philosophy of mind and cognition, concepts, logic and language, action theory, and more. A distinctive feature of this work is that it brings together contributions in both French and English, the two major research languages today on the main theme in question. It unites the most renowned specialists in the field as well as many of Claude Panaccio’s former students who have engaged with his work over the years. In furthering this dialogue, the essays render key topics in fourteenth-century thought accessible to the contemporary philosophical community without being anachronistic or insensitive to the particularities of the medieval context. As a result, this book will appeal to a general population of philosophers and historians of philosophy with an interest in logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics.

In this paper, I intend to examine the conception of metaphor developed by fourteenth-century nominalist philosophers, in particular William of Ockham and John Buridan, but also the Ockhamist philosophers who were condemned by the 1340 statute of the faculty of arts of the University of Paris. According to these philosophers, metaphor is a transfer of meaning from one word to another. This transfer is based on some similarity, and is intentionally produced by a speaker. My aim is to study whether this view on metaphor is related to a specific view on the relation between thought, language, and communication. With this case study, I intend to argue that the view on the nature of thought one holds does not necessarily determine what the nature and function of metaphor are. I will show that the three philosophical doctrines under study diverge in their understanding of the mechanisms of a metaphor, while they share the same view on the nature of thought, namely that thought is a mental language.

This paper is dedicated to William of Ockham’s theory of habit, which he considers to be a disposition of a power of the soul. I will argue that Ockham’s view on the relation between a habit and its manifestation sheds new light on his well-known thesis that sensible and intelligible species are not needed to account for cognition. The identity conditions of habits are themselves the ground of their intentionality: there is no way to track a habit from an act of a given kind except by stipulating a causal relation between them. In this sense, a study of Ockham’s theory of habit is a step towards our understanding of the relation between similarity and causation in his theory of intentionality. Ockham’s theory of habit accommodates intentional phenomena that, contrary to the scholarly consensus, are not ipso facto semantic phenomena.

This chapter consists of a systematic introduction to the nature and function of habitus in Latin medieval philosophy. Over the course of this introduction, several topics are treated: the theoretical necessity to posit habitus; their nature; their causal contribution to the production of internal and external acts; how and why habitus can grow and decay; what makes their unity when they can have multiple objects and work in clusters. Finally, we examine two specific questions: why intellectual habitus represent a special case that triggered considerable debate; how human beings can be said to be free if their actions are determined by moral habitus.

This book features 20 essays that explore how Latin medieval philosophers and theologians from Anselm to Buridan conceived of habitus, as well as detailed studies of the use of the concept by Augustine and of the reception of the medieval doctrines of habitus in Suàrez and Descartes. Habitus are defined as stable dispositions to act or think in a certain way. This definition was passed down to the medieval thinkers from Aristotle and, to a lesser extent, Augustine, and played a key role in many of the philosophical and theological developments of the time. Written by leading experts in medieval and modern philosophy, the book offers a historical overview that examines the topic in light of recent advances in medieval cognitive psychology and medieval moral theory. Coverage includes such topics as the metaphysics of the soul, the definition of virtue and vice, and the epistemology of self-knowledge. The book also contains an introduction that is the first attempt at a comprehensive survey of the nature and function of habitus in medieval thought. The material will appeal to a wide audience of historians of philosophy and contemporary philosophers. It is relevant as much to the historian of ancient philosophy who wants to track the historical reception of Aristotelian ideas as it is to historians of modern philosophy who would like to study the progressive disappearance of the term “habitus” in the early modern period and the concepts that were substituted for it. In addition, the volume will also be of interest to contemporary philosophers open to historical perspectives in order to renew current trends in cognitive psychology, virtue epistemology, and virtue ethics.

This edited volume presents new lines of research dealing with the language of thought and its philosophical implications in the time of Ockham. It features more than 20 essays that also serve as a tribute to the ground-breaking work of a leading expert in late medieval philosophy: Claude Panaccio. Coverage addresses topics in the philosophy of mind and cognition (externalism, mental causation, resemblance, habits, sensory awareness, the psychology, illusion, representationalism), concepts (universal, transcendental, identity, syncategorematic), logic and language (definitions, syllogisms, modality, supposition, obligationes, et cetera), action theory (belief, will, action), and more. A distinctive feature of this work is that it brings together contributions in both French and English, the two major research languages today on the main theme in question. It unites the most renowned specialists in the field as well as many of Claude Panaccio's former students who have engaged with his work over the years. In furthering this dialogue, the essays render key topics in fourteenth-century thought accessible to the contemporary philosophical community without being anachronistic or insensitive to the particularities of the medieval context. As a result, this book will appeal to a general population of philosophers and historians of philosophy with an interest in logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics.

This paper critically examines the debate between William of Ockham and his contemporary Peter Auriol on how to account for the intension and remission of forms. Peter Auriol denies that an added degree of a quality such as the theological virtue of charity could be anything other than something which is neither a universal nor an individual and which cannot be grasped by intuition, but must be posited in order to account for the possibility that an accidental form can vary in intensity. Ockham aims at proving that Auriol’s account is inconsistent. In my opinion, Ockham does not succeed, nor does he succeed in defending a consistent account of the metaphysics underlying the intension and remission of forms. Indeed, he conceives of the degree of a quality as a part of the intensified quality which, while being an individual that is really distinct from the quality and can be picked out, forms a unity with it in such a way that the union of the degree and the quality is itself an individual. Ockham fails to distinguish the notion of maximal resemblance holding between a quality’s degree and the quality from the notion of maximal resemblance which holds between individuals of the same species. In the end, he is led to give up the idea that a degree is an individual that can be picked out in order to protect the core thesis of his nominalism about universals.

Le but de cet article est de proposer une nouvelle interprétation de la nature et de la fonction du principe d’économie tel qu’il est formulé et employé par Guillaume d’Ockham. Je défends l’idée que le principe d’économie tel qu’il est employé par Guillaume d’Ockham peut être compris comme un précepte méthodologique à suivre pour procéder à une inférence vers la meilleure explication. Je me propose donc de répondre aux deux questions suivantes. En quoi un argument d’économie consiste-t-il et quelle est sa valeur explicative? Quel rapport établit-il entre la théorie adoptée et les faits? Pour défendre ma thèse, je procéderai en deux parties principales. Je commencerai par présenter...

In this paper, I intend to reconstruct Ockham’s semantics of the categories in order to prove first that his semantics is consistent. Second, Ockham is not skeptical about the possibility to derive the categories from primitives. According to Ockham, one must accept two principles in order to derive the categories. The first is the principle of ‘in quid’ predication, according to which a name of category can be predicated ‘in quid’ of a determined class of terms. The second is the principle of the transitivity of predication, according to which A is predicated of C if A is predicated of B and B is predicated of C. I will show that Ockham’s semantics of the categories makes two assumptions. According to the first assumption, there exist only two types of things, substances and qualities. According to the second, the categories are mutually exclusive. Ockham’s semantics of the categories implies that the categories are both ontological and conceptual and that it is not possible to prove that there is a determined number of categories.

English summary: This book attests that a study on the history of philosophy has its place in contemporary debates. This book attempts to reconstruct William of Ockham's position on the nature and function of real definitions in order to show that nominalism does not oblige a particular position on essences. French description: Guillaume d'Ockham, defenseur bien connu du nominalisme, a manifeste un interet soutenu pour les definitions reelles. Cet ouvrage s'efforce de reconstruire sa position sur la nature et la fonction des definitions reelles. Un examen de ce qu'est une definition reelle appelle une etude de ce qu'est une essence et de la nature du lien a poser entre l'essentiel et le necessaire. Cet ouvrage a pour objectif de montrer que le nominalisme ne contraint pas a une position determinee sur les essences. Saul Kripke nous dit que l'essentiel se reduit au necessaire. Kit Fine, par contre, affirme qu'il faut revenir a Aristote et soutenir que l'essentiel est irreductible au necessaire. Notre examen atteste qu'une etude en histoire de la philosophie a toute sa place dans les debats contemporains. L'essentialisme de Guillaume d'Ockham incite a rendre a Aristote ce qui lui revient et a faire preuve de circonspection. En definitive, les deux positions en presence ne sont peut-etre pas incompatibles.