Stephen Marrone

Focusing on the seminal works of two early thirteenth-century philosophers, Steven P. Marrone shows how the idea of science" and the desire to be "scientific" first penetrated the scholarly discourse of the medieval West. Originally published in 1983. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In 2008, Andrea Aiello and Robert Wielockx published an article in Documenti e Studi sulla Tradizione Filosofica Medievale that criticized a crucial aspect of my understanding of Henry of Ghent’s theory of human knowledge of the truth. They targeted my claim that after 1279 or 1280, Henry began to move away from his early description of human knowledge of pure truth (sincera veritas) as dependent on an Augustinian illumination of the intellect by God’s light of Truth and to turn to a more Aristotelian notion of truth-perception as consisting of more precise knowledge of the mental object’s essence or quiddity. As evidence that I was wrong, Aiello and Wielockx pointed to numerous passages in Henry’s later works where he directed the reader inquiring about truth back to his earliest explanation of the matter in the beginning of his Summa. In this response, I show that I have always accepted the idea that Henry-all the way to his last works-never abandoned the notion that God as repository of ideal forms played a fundamental role in human knowledge of truth, for he realized that his mature theory of essence meant that his Aristotelianizing version of truth-perception entailed the mind’s penetrating to the divine ideal. And I argue that we should not be surprised that, on those occasions where he directed the reader back to his earliest explanation of knowledge of truth, he did not mention that in precise terms he had modified the mechanics of truthperception. For the mature Henry’s account of knowledge of truth, though not expressed literally in terms of illumination, for all its Aristotelian complexion still maintained the Augustinian insistence that knowledge of truth depended on rati cation by God.

This collection of eight essays on Augustine’s most widely read work focuses, as William Mann says in his introduction, on Augustine as a philosopher. Not every reader will agree that Augustine did indeed philosophize. Many would insist that whatever speculation Augustine engaged in, it was solely as a theologian. Yet each of the authors in this superb volume approaches Augustine in the context of the philosophy of the late Roman world, especially Neoplatonic philosophy. Their success in showing how the themes of the Confessions resonate with the language of philosophers of the time—Plotinus chief among them—and wrestle with many of the same issues vindicates Mann’s claim. Anyone interested in understanding the..

The idea of a special connection between the thought of John Duns Scotus and that of his forebear, Henry of Ghent, goes back to the time of Duns himself, and in the modern scholarly world it is as old as the critical study of medieval philosophy. Moreover in the last four decades there has been a proliferation of articles claiming that one cannot understand Duns until one has mastered the work of Henry. Nowhere has the connection between the two stood out in sharper relief than in the related areas of epistemology and noetics, and here most especially on the matter of the analogy or univocity of the concept of being

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Divine Illumination: The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of KnowledgeSteven P. MarroneLydia Schumacher. Divine Illumination: The History and Future of Augustine’s Theory of Knowledge. Challenges in Contemporary Theology. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. Pp. xiii + 250. Cloth, $119.95.Lydia Schumacher has written an ambitious book. Among the many things she tries to accomplish in the volume, three stand out to this reviewer. First of all, she proposes to reexamine Augustine’s theory of knowledge. She argues that Augustine’s philosophy is grounded in theology. For his theory of knowledge this means, by Schumacher’s reading, that the aim of cognition is to enable the human being to regain its original status as “image of God,” which latter state is manifested in knowing God and making God known. It is the mental, and by extension ethical, process of becoming God’s image that Schumacher says we should, in the Augustinian context, take the phrase ‘divine illumination’ to signify. For Augustine, Schumacher insists, this process is an entirely internal phenomenon constituted by a self-correcting series of intellectual reflections on the part of the mind. In holding to this view, Schumacher emphatically rejects the understanding, common in scholarship, that “divine illumination” for Augustine had to do with mental reference to what she labels an “extrinsic” standard such as the eternal ideas in God’s mind. [End Page 293]Second, Schumacher argues that the Augustinian project, epitomized in his theory of knowledge, was carried out by most of the thinkers of the Latin Middle Ages, particularly by Anselm and Thomas Aquinas. These latter two individuals are therefore divine illumi-nationists of the first order. What historians often designate as an Augustinian current, evident in the high Middle Ages among scholastics from the Franciscan Order, represented instead a deviation, a turn to an entirely novel theological-philosophical project. Here, mind’s work was conceived of as “the immediate and totalized knowledge of an individual essence.” And for this, recourse to an extrinsic standard filled the bill. Consequently, high-medieval Franciscans were the actual propounders of the theory of knowledge Schumacher tells us has wrongly been associated with divine illumination. Moreover, this Franciscan current of thought, once severed from its original theological underpinnings, provided the historical inspiration for modern philosophy, thereby acting as a kind of catalyst for the modernist philosophical problems—as Schumacher receives them—of rationalism and fideism, skepticism as well.Third, Schumacher sounds the call for a contemporary return to the authentic Augustinian project. By starting philosophy, as she claims Augustine did, with theological assumptions, she wants to fashion a “faith-based concept of knowledge” and with it, most importantly, to escape the modernist dilemma of the incompatibility of faith and reason. Grounding philosophy in theology—Christian theology, she maintains—will restore a lost integrity to our procedures of thinking, ultimately redeeming philosophy itself.How much of this program has Schumacher managed to achieve? Since this reviewer is marked out as the key spokesperson for the interpretation of both divine illumination and the history of medieval thought against which Schumacher inveighs, perhaps he should not be the one to answer the question. Still, the reader forewarned, I lay out my opinion. With regard to her first goal, Schumacher makes good on her promise to render Augustine as a theologian bent on working from his assumptions to designate a process whereby philosophy and mankind can be simultaneously restored. She is not so convincing in her attempt to equate this program with divine illumination. For Schumacher, the process of divine illumination is correlative to the idea of God as source of the mind’s power to act. Yet Augustine often plainly associates what he describes as illumination with turning to God and conceding his ideas an important role in the mental processes of judgment and concept formation. It is hard to see how one can honestly exclude this extrinsic element of what Augustine intended.Regarding her second goal, Schumacher does an excellent job of reminding us how Augustinian were almost all medieval scholastics, Thomas included, and warning us not to take the high-scholastic recourse to Aristotle as a sign of opposition to Augustinian modes of thought...

In Hoffmann’s estimation, beginning with Henry of Ghent but only fully with Duns Scotus, a fundamental shift occurred in the Latin scholastic discussion of what had come to be called the “divine ideas.” Up to Henry and Scotus, the “common opinion” of scholastics was that divine ideas provided the intellectual vehicle by which God knew things other than himself, and the important problems to be resolved in their regard concerned the mechanics of creation and the vexing question of how to reconcile the multiplicity of what God knew, including the ideas, with divine simplicity. After Scotus, everything changed. Arguing that God alone, without any special enabling vehicle, sufficed to account for his own cognition, Scotus turned to conceiving the ideas as the objective content of God’s knowledge of things, irrespective of their existential status in the world. In so doing, he substituted for the old problems of creation and multiplicity within simplicity the new ones of the foundations for possibility and the ontological burdens of intelligibility.