Philosophy of Mind in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance by Stephan Schmid

Author:Stephan Schmid
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-05-23T00:00:00+00:00

3 The Condemnation of 1277

To better understand the philosophical currents regarding the issue of the will’s freedom, it will be helpful to begin with an event that occurred slightly before the period examined in this volume. The sudden influx of previously lost Aristotelian texts in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries excited much scholarly attention in the Latin West. Some of the attention was enthusiastic – after all, here was a sophisticated philosophical picture ranging over a wide array of issues – but some was more wary. A variety of Aristotelian positions were or at least seemed incompatible with Christian doctrine. Unsurprisingly, then, the thirteenth century saw a series of battles between those more enthusiastic about Aristotelian philosophy and those more concerned with defending Christian doctrine from this pagan threat.

One salvo came in 1277 when, at the behest of Pope John XXI, Stephen Tempier, the Bishop of Paris, issued a condemnation of 219 or 220 propositions that a commission of 16 theologians had purportedly drawn from a number of suspect writings. Tempier was concerned that some scholars, especially in the faculty of arts, were giving serious consideration to a variety of positions contrary to the Catholic faith, supporting them by appeal to “gentile” writings, and then failing adequately to refute those erroneous positions. Consequently, in order to save those who might hear such things and be led into error, Tempier forbade the teaching of the condemned propositions and excommunicated all who in any way taught or defended them or even just listened to them.

The condemned propositions deal with a wide range of topics from the unicity of the intellect (whose late medieval reception is discussed in Chapter 4) to the eternity of the world to astral determinism to the killing of irrational animals. Most relevant for present purposes, a number of the condemned propositions seem to limit human freedom in some way or other. Propositions stating that the will is moved by heavenly bodies, that the will follows appetite, and that the will submits to the intellect’s judgements are all condemned as undermining the human freedom essential for moral responsibility (Wippel 1995: 255–261, 2002: 70).

There is very little consensus about the Condemnation of 1277.6 Scholars disagree, for example, about who the targets of the condemnation were (especially whether Thomas Aquinas was a target), and they disagree about how much of an effect these condemnations had on subsequent philosophical work. With respect to our topic, it appears that voluntarist accounts that emphasized human freedom became more prevalent after the condemnations. Since certain accounts that in modern terms might be labelled determinist or compatibilist accounts were clearly condemned, one might attribute this rise in voluntarist accounts to the constraints imposed by Tempier’s condemnations. Certainly, some who subsequently defended voluntarist accounts appealed explicitly to the condemnations in support of their own views. On the other hand, perhaps the condemnations merely captured the sentiments of a philosophical trend already underway. Perhaps dissatisfaction with intellectualist accounts was already increasing for independent philosophical reasons. It seems safe

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