Richard Cross

Dopo una premessa in cui si precisano le finalità dell'articolo e si fa il punto sugli antecedenti della discussione, concentrandosi sulle trattazioni teologiche degli autori del sec. XII, l'A. studia gli sviluppi offerti da Enrico di Gand alla teoria agostiniana delle relazioni applicata alle tre persone della Trinità. La seconda parte dello studio è dedicata alla risposta elaborata da Duns Scoto alla posizione di Enrico: fondandosi su differenti elaborazioni della teoria della relazione, i due autori analizzzano le proprietà delle tre persone della Trinità, da cui risultano concezioni metafisiche pronfondamente distinte.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Four-Dimensionalism and Identity Across Time: Henry of Ghent vs. BonaventureRichard CrossModern accounts of the identity of an object across time tend to fall roughly into two basic types.Let us say that something persists ıff, somehow or other, it exists at various times; this is the neutral word. Something perdures iff it persists by having different temporal parts, or stages, at different times, though no one part of it is wholly present at more than one time; whereas it endures iff it persists by being wholly present at more than one time.1On the first of these analyses, but not the second, a persistent object includes temporal parts, and persistent material substances are thus on this analysis four-dimensional objects. On the first analysis, but not on the second, time-indices are explicable in terms of temporal parts. I shall take this as the basic difference between the two views.2Both views allow us to talk of temporal order and temporal direction. I [End Page 393] shall follow the medievals and talk about succession to capture both of these claims: “The notion of succession formally consists in the notion of ‘before’ and ‘after,’”3 and I take it that talk of “before” and “after” entails both order and direction.4 Medieval accounts of identity across time are, however, in some ways more obscure than the two modern ones just described. The medievals tend to associate all temporal succession with temporal extension: an object x has temporal succession if and only if x is temporally extended (and thus includes temporal parts).5 The medievals also (correctly, I believe) tend to suppose that substances—unlike (say) processes—do not have temporal parts.6 Thus, by the end of the thirteenth century the schoolmen commonly [End Page 394] distinguish permanent objects from successive objects. Permanent objects do not, and successive objects do, have temporal parts.7 Successive objects are processes; the class of permanent objects was generally held to include not only God, but also angels, material substances, and static accidents (i.e., accidents which do not entail any sort of process).8Given these claims, there is a problem to be faced in giving an account of the identity of, say, a material substance across time. But it is not the problem we would face. Our problem, post-Hume, is to explain the relevant (explanatory) continuity requirements for identity across time. The medievals’ problem is rather different. They do not need to specify general continuity requirements, because for them there is a very real sense in which substances—and indeed all permanent objects—lack temporal extension and, therefore, any sort of temporal succession at all. The problem for the medievals is thus to explain how substances can persist at all, rather than exist merely fleetingly.9In what follows, I will examine two thirteenth-century solutions to this problem. The first is a radical one: simply to deny the standard claim that substances lack temporal parts. This view will thus bear some resemblance to what we would label four-dimensionalism. The second solution I will examine represents one of the more successful attempts to defend the standard thirteenth-century line that substances lack temporal parts. This solution goes some way towards allowing succession (and time-indexing) without appealing to temporal parts.To understand the debate, we need to keep in mind that the medievals—following Aristotle—talk of the temporality of an object in terms of its being [End Page 395] measured by time. Confusingly, they might speak of a substance’s being measured in one sort of way, and its accidental properties’ being measured in another. Thus, by the end of the thirteenth century it was often claimed that the duration of a substance is measured not by time but by the aevum—the durational measure of objects lacking temporal parts—while some of a substance’s accidental properties could be measured by time. (I will explain in detail below how time and the aevum were understood.) On this view, the temporality of an object’s properties is not sufficient cause for positing the temporality of the object. There are acceptable and unacceptable ways of understanding...

According to an important set of medieval arguments, it is impossible to make a distinction between creation and conservation on the assumption of a beginningless universe. The argument is that, on such an assumption, either God is never causally sufficient for the existence of the universe, or, if He is at one time causally sufficient for the existence of the universe, He is at all times causally sufficient for the universe, and occasionalism is true. I defend the claim that these arguments are successful. Since Christian theology requires a distinction between creation and conservation, arguments in favour of the possible eternity of the world fail.

This excellent book provides a novel analysis of medieval theories of faith, using as its conceptual basis the notion of doxastic voluntarism: the thought that belief is in some sense in our power to choose. This notion fits very neatly with medieval accounts, since, other than in cases in which the intellect's assent is compelled, the medieval philosophers all maintained that assent to a given proposition—paradigmatically the supernatural claims of Catholic Christianity, the principal interest of the earliest thinkers in Nicolas Faucher's account—was in some sense voluntary. Indeed, one thing that the book illustrates very nicely is the way in which problems that begin in the...

According to a well-known interpretation, Henry of Ghent holds that possible but non-existent essences – items merely with what Henry labels ‘esse essentiae’ – have some reality external to the divine mind, but short of actual existence (esse existentiae). I argue that this reading of Henry is mistaken. Furthermore, Henry identifies any essence, considered independently of its existence as a universal concept or as instantiated in a particular as an item that has some kind of reality in the divine intellect, and that constitutes an object of thought for that intellect. This object is distinguished from the universal concepts of creaturely cognition.

Contrary to the claims of recent commentators, I argue that Boethius holds a modified version of the Ammonian three-fold universal (transcendent, immanent, and conceptual). He probably identifies transcendent universals as divine ideas, and accepts too forms immanent in corporeal particulars, most likely construing these along the Aphrodisian lines that he hints at in a well-known passage from his second commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge. Boethius never states the theory of the three-fold form outright, but I attempt to show that this theory nevertheless underlies and gives structure to what Boethius has to say on the topic.

Scotus consistently holds that eternity is to be understood as timelessness. In his early Lectura, he criticizes Aquinas’ account of eternity on the grounds that (1) it entails collapsing past and future into the present, and (2) it entails a B-theory of time, according to which past, present and future are all ontologically on a par with each other. Scotus later comes to accept something like Aquinas’ account of God’s timelessness and the B-theory of time which it entails. Scotus also offers a refutation of his earlier argument that Aquinas’ account of eternity entails collapsing past and future into the present.

According to Swinburne, one way of dealing with the guilt that attaches to a morally bad action is satisfaction, consisting of repentance, apology, reparation, and penance. Thus, Christ's life and death make atonement for human sin by providing a reparation which human beings would otherwise be unable to pay. I argue that the nature of God's creative activity entails that human beings can by themselves make reparation for their sins, merely by apology. So there is no need for additional reparation, and the satisfaction theory of the atonement is otiose. Following an insight of Swinburne's, I argue that satisfaction is not sufficient for forgiveness, since satisfaction does not place the wronged party under any obligation to forgive the wrongdoer. Christ's death merits the forgiveness of those sins for which human beings have made satisfaction. It does this in virtue of a divine promise to reward Christ's meritorious life with the forgiveness of such human sin.

John Baconthorpe canvasses a number of views on the question of the identity of the feature of a divine person that enables that person to become incarnate. The possible features are: the divine essence, the personal property, or the union of both. The views considered are those of Duns Scotus, Durandus of Saint-Pourcain, Peter Auriol, and an Oxonian theologian Walter Burdon, none of whose writing otherwise survive. Baconthorpe's own view is that the union of essence and person is the relevant incarnation-permitting feature.

Like any other group of philosophers, scholastic thinkers from the Middle Ages disagreed about even the most fundamental of concepts. With their characteristic style of rigorous semantic and logical analysis, they produced a wide variety of diverse theories about a huge number of topics. The Routledge Companion to Medieval Philosophy offers readers an outstanding survey of many of these diverse theories, on a wide array of subjects. Its 35 chapters, all written exclusively for this Companion by leading international scholars, are organized into seven parts: I Language and Logic II Metaphysics III Cosmology and Physics IV Psychology V Cognition VI Ethics and Moral Philosophy VII Political Philosophy In addition to shedding new light on the most well-known philosophical debates and problems of the medieval era, the Companion brings to the fore topics that may not traditionally be associated with scholastic philosophy, but were in fact a veritable part of the tradition. These include chapters covering scholastic theories about propositions, atomism, consciousness, and democracy and representation. The Routledge Companion to Medieval Philosophy is a helpful, comprehensive introduction to the field for undergraduate students and other newcomers as well as a unique and valuable resource for researchers in all areas of philosophy.

Contrary to a common assumption, I argue that there is full agreement between East and West on the issue of the relation between the divine essence and the divine persons. I defend this claim by using the understanding of universals found in D. M. Armstrong to cast light on the theories. Taking Gregory of Nyssa and John of Damascus as representatives of the Eastern tradition, I show that this tradition sees the divine essence as a numerically singular object that is wholly present in each divine person. The Eastern tradition explicitly sees this object as a universal. The Western tradition – exemplified in Augustine and Aquinas – likewise sees the divine essence as a numerically singular object that is wholly present in each divine person. But this tradition customarily denies that such an object could be a universal, on the merely philosophical grounds that universals are divided amongst the particulars that share them, and thus cannot be numerically one. Having shown the fundamental consonance of the two traditions, I argue by way of conclusion that differences between social and non–social theories of the Trinity depend entirely on the nature and extent of the features that are supposed to distinguish the persons from each other.

Aquinas generally adopts a fallibilist epistemology, according to which it is often impossible to have good internalist justification for a belief. In line with this, he adopts a fully externalist account of the reasonableness of divine faith. Faith is justified if and only if it is caused in the believer by God. Scotus is more optimistic about the prospects for internalist justification generally. Hence, he believes that it is possible to have justified belief even on the basis of merely human testimony. The views that the two thinkers adopt on the theological question are thus wholly parasitic on prior epistemological commitments.

The Christian doctrine of the Incarnation maintains that the second person of the Trinity became a human being, retaining all attributes necessary for being divine and gaining all attributes necessary for being human. As usually understood, the doctrine involves the claim that the second person of the Trinity is the subject of the attributes of Jesus Christ, the first-century Jew whose deeds are reported in various ways in the New Testament. The fundamental philosophical problem specific to the doctrine is this: how is it that one and the same thing could be both divine and human. Most of the philosophical effort devoted to the specifics of the doctrine has centered on this issue, which is the focus of this article.