On Being and Cognition by John Duns Scotus

Author:John Duns Scotus
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Fordham University Press

FURTHER REPLY TO HENRY’S ARGUMENTS

280 Regarding the sixth article [cf. n. 218], we must see how the three arguments given for the first opinion [nn. 211–13], insofar as they are based on Augustine, lead to a true conclusion, although they do not lead to the false conclusion for which they were brought in.—Here one must know [here the texts breaks off]

[Interpolation] that genuine truth is not to be expected from sensible things as from a per se and principal cause, since sensory knowledge is truly something accidental, as has been said [cf. nn. 234, 245], even though sensory acts, at least some of them, are certain and true. But the quiddity of a thing is known in virtue of the agent intellect (which is a participation in the uncreated light that illuminates phantasms), and in this way genuine truth is obtained. And this solves the first argument of Henry [in n. 211], which, following Augustine’s intentions, does not permit a further conclusion.

To Henry’s second argument [in 212] I say that the soul can change from one different act to another according to a diversity of objects and according to its unlimitedness and immateriality, for it stands in relation to any being whatsoever. The soul can also change from activity to non-activity, for it is not always in act. But with respect to first principles, whose truth is known from their terms, and with respect to the conclusions that are evident on the basis of the terms, the soul cannot change from one contrary position to another, from true to false. For the intellect is corrected by rules in the light of the agent intellect, and although the intelligible species of the terms is changeable in its being (in essendo), it represents [the terms] in an immutable way when it is representing [them] in the light of the agent intellect. The terms of a first principle are known through two intelligible species, and so their union is true and evidently certain.

As for the third argument [of Henry, in n. 213], one must say that it concludes against him, for it only assumes a sensible species or a phantasm, but it does not conclude anything concerning an intelligible species that represents a quiddity. One must say, however, that a sensible species, when the sensitive powers are not obstructed, truly represents a real thing. But during sleep the external sensory powers are chained. Therefore, the imagination, which conserves sensible species according to the varying flow of the humors in the head, perceives them as the things whose likeness they are because they have the force of these things, according to the Philosopher in On the Motion of Animals. The third argument does not conclude anything else.

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