A Metaphysics of Creation for the Information Age: A Dialogue with Duns Scotus 9781666902983, 9781666902990, 1666902985

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A Metaphysics of Creation for the Information Age

A Metaphysics of Creation for the Information Age A Dialogue with Duns Scotus Liran Shia Gordon

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.rowman.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2022 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Gordon, Liran Shia, author.   Title: A metaphysics of creation for the information age : a dialogue with Duns Scotus / Liran Shia Gordon.   Other titles: Dialogue with Duns Scotus   Description: Lanham ; Boulder ; New York ; London : Lexington Books, 2022.  | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: "Through an analysis of the role of the will as the supreme principle of Scotus's thought, ultimately manifested in the idea of creation, A Metaphysics of Creation for the Information Age offers a transcendental investigation of finite and limited beings that are fundamentally understood as information entities"-- Provided by publisher.   Identifiers: LCCN 2022007915 (print) | LCCN 2022007916 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666902983 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666902990 (ebook)   Subjects: LCSH: Duns Scotus, John, approximately 1266-1308. | Metaphysics.  | Creation. | Information technology.  Classification: LCC B765.D74 G67 2022  (print) | LCC B765.D74  (ebook) | DDC 110-dc23/eng/20220228  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007915 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022007916   The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Acknowledgments vii Abbreviations ix Introduction

1

Chapter 1‌‌‌: Created Matter



17

Chapter 2‌‌‌: Matter as Memorial Entity Chapter 3‌‌‌: Being Somewhere

35

45



Chapter 6‌‌‌‌‌‌: Let There Be Freedom

61

73

Chapter 7‌‌‌: Suffering, Emotions, and Rationality Chapter 8‌‌‌: Causality and Information



Chapter 9‌‌‌: Rethinking Personhood



Epilogue ‌‌‌ Notes



89 107 121 135

139

Bibliography Index

25



Chapter 4‌‌‌: Truth and Existence Chapter 5‌‌‌: Time and Eternity



177

193

About the Author



199

v

Acknowledgments

Many people accompanied me through this journey, offering me their support, advice, and love. Parts of this volume are outcomes of my research at the Hebrew University, others at the De Wulf Mansion Centre at KU Leuven and the Pontifical Gregorian University, and above all, I benefitted from continuously working at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute library. I want to thank the many foundations and fellowships that supported me throughout the years, the Hoffmann and Lev-Zion Fellowships, the Posen Foundation, the Mandel Fellowship, the Center for the Study of Christianity at the Hebrew University, and the Cardinal Bea Centre for Judaic Studies at the Gregorian University. I am grateful to the Erasmus program, to Aldegone and the late Hubert Brenninkmeijer-Werhahn who generously supported my journey and offered their friendship. I wish to thank Gabriel Motzkin, who kept my mind fresh though mischievous, and to Yosef Schwarz, whose erudition kept me from being too mischievous. Avital Wohlman implanted in me the love for medieval philosophy and was always eager to read my work and listen to my ideas. Sandra Fine patiently edited my work. I thank my friends Gil Cohen, Eliyahu Rotenberg, Nurit Levi and Yaad Blum, for the ongoing conversations and remarks as also the many anonymous reviewers throughout the years, who offered their advice, support, and sometimes rejections, without which one cannot move forward. David Ohana, Guy Schultz, Yamit Rachman Schrire, Rafael Starnitzky, and Adi Libson, whose friendship, advice, and shoulder were always there. Mati Kochavi was perspicacious enough to accept me as I am, and in allowing me to keep vii

pursuing my intellectual goals, provided enormous assistance. My gratitude goes out to the many other people whom I encountered near and far—to my parents, Avi and Ellen, who had to deal with me from the beginning; to Lea and Moshe Nazarathy, who continuously supported my endeavors; to Naama, without whom this journey could not have taken place; and to Tzruya, who challenged what one should remember. And to my children, Adaya, Amichai, and Ivry, who fill my life with joy, I extend my heartfelt love.

viii

Abbreviations

John Duns Scotus Lect.: Lectura: Prologue, I-III. Opera Omnia. edited by Commissio Scotistica. Vol. 17–21: Città del Vaticano: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 17–21: 1966–2004. Ord.: Ordinatio, Prologue, I-IV. Opera Omnia. edited by Commissio Scotistica. Vol. 1–13: Città del Vaticano: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1–14: 1950–2013. Quodl.: God and Creatures: The Quodlibetal Questions. Translated by Allan B Wolter and Felix Alluntis (Princeton University Press, 1975); Quaest. Metaphys.: Questions on the Metaphysics of Aristotle by John Duns Scotus, Bk. I-IX, Vol. 1–2. Translated by Girard J Etzkorn and Allan B Wolter. Text Series 19. St. Bonaventure, N.Y: Franciscan Institute Publications, 1997, 1998. Rep. I-A: Reportatio I-A, Prologue, dd. 1–48: Latin Text and English Translation. Translated by Allan B. Wolter and O. V. Bychkov. Vol. 1–2, St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2004, 2008. Rep. IV-A: Reportatio IV-A, dd. 1–17: Latin and English Translation. Translated by O. V. Bychkov. Ed. R. Trent Pomplun. Vol. 1–2, St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute, 2016. Thomas Aquinas ST: Summa Theologiae, Benziger Bros. edition, 1947. Translated by Fathers of the English Dominican Province. QDV: Questiones Disputatae de Veritate, Chicago: Henry Regnery Company 1952–4. Translated by Mulligan, McGlynn and Schmidt. SCG: Summa contra Gentiles I, New York: Hanover House, 1955–57, translated by Anton C. Pegis. ix

Introduction

The Biblical story of the Creation and the Fall is a story of how Man found himself in this imperfect world, left to his own devices, continuously seeking to overcome the scarcity of resources on the one hand, and to redeem himself from his own corrupt nature, on the other hand. Man’s innovations, executed through technology, allow him to liberate himself from his dependency on the natural environment, providing him with the ability to recreate the world in the image of his needs and desires. Information technology is an essential step in this process, allowing us to transcend the real world, placing ourselves in alternative virtual realities. This contribution is an attempt to construct a metaphysics that corresponds with the challenges the information revolution poses, assisting us in finding our place in the emerging world. Finding a place for Man in this emerging world is not merely a response to technological challenges, but also requires us to be attentive to Man’s nature, to that which makes him “the image of God.” Through a transcendental analysis of creaturehood, that is, of what it means to be a created being, the study offers not only a useful conceptual framework to address the metaphysical challenges posed by the information revolution, but perhaps more importantly, to ensure that our own creation will not corrupt that which makes us human. Finitude is the fundamental grounding of our existence: to exist here and now, bounded to a specific body, time, location, and conditions. These conditions significantly influence who we are, what we need to do, and who we want to be. All these, that we are born into, are existential testimony of our createdness. We did not bring about our existence; we were cast into it. Being finite, our existence directs us toward the boundless stars and determines the unbreachable limitedness within which our being understands itself and its world. As finite created beings, we understand and situate our beingness as contrasted with another type of unlimited Being, which is infinite and uncreated. The emergence of the medieval doctrine of the transcendentals (distinct from the Kantian transcendental examination) allowed us to consider these two types of beings under one logical framework. It opened a new 1

2

Introduction

metaphysical way to think of what it means to be a being, both infinite and a finite created being, and the relations between them. It is not simply a causal relation between the maker and his product, but a logical one as well, that defines their beingness, and their disposition to one another. This distinction between the causal-productive aspect of creation and the logical one allows us to consider creation not as a historical fact but also as a constitutive fact, that wires up the manner we operate and think. Focusing on the latter facthoodness of our existence, we can transcend the question of whether there is a creator, unfolding only the transcendental stipulations of our existence that define our fundamental way of being in the world and how our mind assembles its thinking. Creation is a theological and mythopoetic notion that is typically discussed by theologians or cultural researchers, or by historians of religions who follow the way religions evolve. Generally speaking, creation does not play a decisive role in philosophical discussions nowadays. A common view argues that creation is a theological notion that is alien to a rational philosophical discussion and should not fall under the domain of philosophy. The study will argue that a careful examination of the idea of creation reveals a hidden dialogue between a wide array of fundamental philosophical and theological questions and the way they coalesce as philosophical systems. In this respect, the notion of creation offers “a larger vision of what we are doing . . . [by showing] the philosopher alternative ways of conceiving what philosophy is.”1 And yet, despite the historical outlook, it is the future that has guided and driven the questioning of the study. The emerging revolution carried by the information technology poses increasing challenges to the modern epistemological and ontological categories through which we understand the world and our place in it. The clear distinction between subject and object, thinking and non-thinking beings, and other modern distinctions, becomes insufficient to explain contemporary technology and its entities, for example, internet entities such as Google, whose mode of existence does not match the subject/object paradigm, or artificial intelligence that challenges our traditional understanding of thinking and living. The growing discrepancy between the emerging technological reality and its relation to us, and the modern categories of thinking, undermines the applicability, and consequently the relevancy, of these categories to explain the emerging world. Thus arises a need for a philosophical reconsideration of the categories through which we understand the emerging technological world and its dynamics. Surprisingly, whereas the traditional modern outlook finds itself in disaccord with the new technological environment, metaphysical systems that were discussed by medieval philosophers correspond well to a wide array of the phenomena in which the information revolution envelops us.

Introduction

3

The present study develops the principles of John Duns Scotus’s thought and offers a metaphysics of finite beings that copes better with the challenges posed by information technology. Specifically, this metaphysics transcends the classical physicalist image of reality and permits a less rigid framework to think about wide array of philosophical notions. This is conducted through an analysis of the role of the will as the supreme principle of Scotus’s thought, ultimately manifested in the idea of creation. The study addresses a wide array of issues that correspond implicitly or explicitly to challenges posed by the emerging technological world. The discussion of these problems is either conducted at the end of the chapters following the insertion of a dingbat, or is to be found throughout the discussion of Scotus’s thought itself, exemplifying possible metaphysical avenues to examine the issues. Here are examples of philosophical questions that the information revolution leaves at our doorstep with which classical modern philosophy struggles to cope, although they were straightforward for Scholastic philosophy in the Middle Ages: 1.  The modern dichotomic distinction between the physical and the mind does not function well in the habitat that is formed by the information revolution. Consider the following examples: What is the ontological status of information entities, for example., cloud computing, that “think,” “operate,” and “cognize” in a non-localized manner? Can a physicalist outlook on reality genuinely explain the development of artificial intelligence and its infiltration into our lives? How productive is the distinction between the physical and the mind for the explanation of the relationship between the real world and the virtual world? What is the manner in which we are present when we communicate and act in the virtual world? These questions sharpen the possibility that the classic distinction is not capable of dealing with these problems. Information technology demands that we rethink these issues, and Scholastic thought offers fruitful horizons to examine these questions, for example in their discussions of the way the immaterial thinking beings (a.k.a. angels) take presence, communicate, and act. 2.  Following the mechanical imagination, modern thought championed efficient causality while restricting the teleological causality to the human psychology. Information technology calls us to rethink the place of teleological causality and perhaps to restore it to its glory. As technology advances and becomes an integral part of our lives, it strives to order our world in the most efficient way. Through computational weightlifting and cloud services, technology bridges the physical world and allows us to operate immediately from a distance, being present anywhere we desire, purchasing goods, wiring money, and managing

4

Introduction

our business everywhere and without mediators. By so doing, technological companies such as Google and Facebook reorganize the world not according to its material structure but rather according to information and our desires, and Google/Facebook’s interference of the process. In addition, real “stupid” and silent entities are rapidly connected to the internet, turning them into a network of virtual-real things, that is also called the internet of things. In so doing, things become intelligent and aware of their surroundings, virtual or real, driving them to serve desired ends. This awakening of the world, turning it from a silent universe into a community of beings who strive to fulfill their ends, is nothing other than the medieval image of reality. 3.  As opposed to the modern attitude to things, which reduces them to their parts and rejects their essential individuation, the medieval conception of thinghoodness perceives things according to their essential activity, that transcends their material components. An example to that can be seen in the manner a new smartphone/computer absorbs the “identity” of an old one and replaces it. The thinghoodness of the thing is that which turns the smartphone/computer from consisting of hardware and general applications, into a thing with an identity. It is actualized in something specific, but its essence is separated from it. The manner in which the thinghoodness of the smartphone resides in the smartphone resembles how medieval metaphysics explained the manner in which the soul resides in the body. 4.  While the scientific enterprise emptied the world from supernatural entities, the technological world brings them back to life. The world becomes filled with active intelligent entities who communicate with us in an ever-more complex structure that are composed of indefinite number of machines that think together numerous problems. This process of ever-evolving machines, that are continuously growing and deepening their grasp of reality and prediction of our behavior, points to an ideal computational entity that is present everywhere and its capacity to know and to act is unlimited. Medieval theological discourse used the terms omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent (all knowing, all powerful and all present) to describe such an unlimited super being, and they attributed them to one Being alone—God. Like the classical definition of God, Google and its rivals strive to become quasi-all-knowing/powerful/present entities. In many respects, they develop into a supreme being, and addressing them mandates the development of an information theology. Reflecting on the theological problem how come God permitted or desired the existence of evil, a problem that emphasizes the tension between power and ethics, the discussion regarding whether or not technology should be limited by human ethics becomes urgent.

Introduction

5

CREATION The notion of creation, which is concerned with God’s relationship and sovereignty over the world and its creatures, stands at the center of one of the most crucial intellectual revolutions the world has seen. The development of this doctrine, which involves numerous players and intellectual and spiritual traditions, spans several centuries and has been discussed in many studies.2 If we try to pinpoint the essence of the doctrine of creation, it revolves around the relationship between the existence of the world as such and the will. It can be said that those who hold that the existence of the world arose out of necessity reject creation, whereas those who hold that the world came about by the agency of a free will, who willed it into existence, accept creation. The pivotal element that divides these two groups marks a categorical and dialectical distinction between the opposing intellectual views. During the first centuries before and after Christ, under the multicultural umbrella of the Hellenic-Roman world, a wide spectrum of Persian, Jewish, Greek, and other traditions sprouted novel doctrines that intermingled with the different mythological and philosophical viewpoints. The dispute regarding the question of whether the world was created marks the watershed line that governed the inner logic of the debate that forever distinguished between monotheistic and pagan thought, and between Orthodox Christianity and non-Orthodox Christianity. Of these it is worth paying attention to the Gnostic dualistic sects, such as Manichaeism, that “were the major preoccupation of mainstream Christianity”3 in the first formative centuries after Christ. The Gnostics fused versions of the biblical story with eastern Persian traditions and philosophical teachings, among which Platonic and Neoplatonic thought played a significant role. Christian strands of Gnosticism, that Gilles Quispel calls tragic Christianities,4 split the deity into two opposing and eternal principles, one of light and the other of darkness, offered an appealing version of “Christianity” that could easily explain the problem of evil—a problem that causes much discomfiture to monotheistic religions that found it difficult to explain the source of evil. The main advantage the Gnostic framework offered was a relatively simple and straightforward explanation for the nature and manifested existence of evil and, consequently, through a rich mythological drama, an explanation for our fallen position in this world as embedded in corrupted matter. Evil exists and man cannot deny it. The Gnostic view, according to which there are good and bad deities, explains very simply why there is evil. It is simply rooted in the radical ontological existence of the evil deity that cannot be reduced to anything else. This claim was strongly supported by Greek philosophy that

6

Introduction

identified an element of reality that resists rationality, e.g., the internal disposition of things to descend into disorder in Plato’s Timaeus, Aristotle’s understanding of matter as non-intelligible in itself, and afterward the “demonizing of matter”5 by neo-Platonic philosophy.6 The Christian development of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo does not appear in ancient Jewish sources for they never truly assimilated philosophy into their core.7 It arose from the Church’s need to face down the Gnostics who assimilated Christ into their mythological scheme, and consequently posed a serious challenge to the orthodoxy of the Church.8 The aim of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo is to dismantle the mythological dynamics that govern the Gnostic view by subordinating all that is, including matter, under God’s will. By maintaining that matter was created by the divine will, the Christians were confronted with the need to explain the existence of evil that could no longer be explained through the evilness of matter. Though this doctrine created short-term problems regarding the nature of evil, the creationist position that all was created by the divine will, and consequently desired, implied that everything, as part of its constitution fell under the domain of the good. While Augustine’s polemics against Manichaeism, an important strand of Christian Gnosticism, was most effective, it was never fully overcome. The spread of the dualist neo-Manichaeist movements in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries (the Cathars and the Albigensians) posed the most severe threat to the Christian doctrine until the Reformation, and prompted a Crusade that took both violent and intellectual shapes. The Church’s reaction, which was initially a response to the Cathar heresy, ultimately shaped the church’s intellectual and doctrinal backbone. An example of the effect on the Church’s doctrine was the Fourth Lateran Council, convened during the Crusade, that canonized different issues regarding creation, such as whether the world was created ex nihilo. The institutional influence on the Church can be identified in the formation of the order of preachers (1216),9 the Dominicans, who were specifically tasked with addressing the Cathar heresy. The confrontation with neo-Manichaeism permeated deeply into the intellectual system, as it was systematically developed and integrated by the leading intellectuals of the age. In this sense, their approach to the question of creation is more defensive/offensive, using external philosophical argumentation to strengthen the agreed-upon doctrine. For example, Aristotle’s causation doctrine reduced the world to “the first effect of the divine power”10; or, the integration of Neo-Platonic views on emanation contradicted the Manichean belief that a higher evil exists.11 The discovery of Arab and Greek thought by the Latin West during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries led to one of the most ambitious intellectual enterprises in history: the attempt to integrate Christian theology with natural

Introduction

7

philosophical thought. The harsh Condemnation of 1277 marked a theological rejection of this attempt to synthesize Aristotle and Augustine, setting clear restrictions on philosophical propositions and subjugating the philosophical discussion to the unique role of the divine will.12 And yet, these restrictions forced the theologians to reexamine metaphysics through new lenses, resulting in what some called “the second beginning of metaphysics.”13 In the aftermath of the Condemnation of 1277 and its rejection of the naturalistic synthesization of Christianity and Aristotelian science taken broadly, Duns Scotus, following the Franciscan sensitivities, displayed a Christian response that found the way to reinterpret Aristotle ideas through Augustinian lenses, and to incorporate them into the branch of freedom. Scotus’s thought, which is, first and foremost, a philosophy and theology of the will, along with his understanding of metaphysics as the scientia transcendens and his conception of being as univocal, represents the most comprehensive notion of how the idea of creatio ex nihilo was integrated into metaphysics. Scotus’s thought profoundly impacted the shifting of the theological-philosophical discussion from an examination of causes to a transcendental one that conceives this world as one among many possible creations. As such scholastic thinkers did not conceive the physical reality as the basis for their analysis. Instead they focused on the conditions for any possible reality, regardless of the question which world is actualized. This led them to develop a logic that aims to cover not this specific reality but all possible realities. This logic of possible worlds is primarily concerned with the relationships between things and other things or other minds, and central to it is the notion of thinghoodness. Under such a perspective, the questioning about creation shifted from a how-oriented questioning about the causes that govern creation to a more why-oriented questioning. Though of the utmost importance for the appreciation of the question of creation, this study will leave behind the rich mythological mind that ruled the intellectual debate in the first centuries as it was conveyed by the Church Fathers, Gnostics or otherwise. Instead, the study develops Scotus’s thought in order to present a series of transcendental accounts that follow creation. At this point, we need to distinguish between two senses of the term transcendentals. The study as a whole is a transcendental examination in the Kantian sense insofar as it aims to transcend a casual description of events in order to explicate the structural effect of creation, once that was presupposed, specifically on a wide range of transcendental notions. Here the term transcendental is used in its second sense as first conceptions as it is manifested in medieval philosophy. There are few things that the perplexed reader needs to know about the complicated medieval doctrine of the transcendentals. The transcendentals are primitive notions that precede and transcend the division into the categories, and consequently apply to all of them. Thus the

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Introduction

doctrine of the transcendentals is the most fundamental doctrine concerning beings insofar as they are beings and regardless of any further determination, whether there are being in existence, colors or numbers. Though there are different transcendental models, in general the main transcendental notions are Being, Thing, One, True, and Good. The transcendentals are different significations of the same thing. Following Aquinas’s classical treatment in De Veritate,14 when Being is considered in itself, it can be addressed according to its whatness, i.e., as a thing. As a Being that possesses unity, Being is considered according to its undividedness or as its oneness of being. Being can also be considered according to the manner of its correspondence by the mind. True expresses the correspondence of the knowing power to being as the assimilation of the knower into the known and Good expresses the correspondence of the appetitive power to being as “that which all desire.” Lastly, the transcendentals are coextensive, that is to say, that the notions echo in one another.15 Thus, the study itself is a transcendental examination of creation, in the Kantian sense, that is significantly focused on different transcendental notions, primarily being, thing, true, and good. The materialization of the study is thus shaped by applying these two logics, the medieval one that concerns the relations between the thing in its beingness, to its whatness, and how it is understood by the mind, and the Kantian one, that unearths what is presupposed by posing being as a created being. Though in many scholarly works Scotus is depicted as a theologian of creation, an explicit treatment of Scotus’s conception of creation is rare. Moreover, the rare treatments that do exist have the tendency either to (1) revisit their discussion as it applies to other topics, (2) misrepresent Scotus’s thought or (3) simply use Scotus’s thought as it is contrasted with that of other theologians. These tendencies are very telling. For whereas the first case exemplifies the difficulty of presenting the Scotistic account of creation, the latter two tend to reduce Scotus’s thought to a general scheme that, by and large, misses the deep theological insights Scotistic thought carries within it. However, such a reduced understanding of Scotus poses important criteria that any genuine doctrine of creation needs to answer. An example of the first case is found in Mary Beth Ingham and Ilia Delio’s studies,16 who devoted chapters to discussing Scotus’s view of creation. What is notable about their discussions is that they do not say much about creation itself but rather introduce other Scotistic doctrines, e.g., the Univocity of Being, Haecceity, The Primacy of Christ, etc. These doctrines are undoubtedly related to the question of creation but are not exclusive to it. As a result, our understanding of creation, and specifically how Scotus’s thought advances our understanding of creation, is suspended. Recognizing the importance of their accounts, Oliver Boulnois17 succeeds in distilling the essence of Scotus’s account of creation. By comparing Aquinas’s approach

Introduction

9

to contingency, Boulnios emphasizes the way Scotus reformulates the logic of creation. Whereas Aquinas understands contingency as an expression of accidentality and the gradation of lower entities, Scotus conceives contingency as an essential expression of creation that God desired. The logic of contingency, and its transcendental features, are thus rooted within the act of creation itself. David B. Burrell’s Creation, Will, and Knowledge in Aquinas and Duns Scotus,18 and Rudi te Velde’s Metaphysics and the Question of Creation19 represent the latter approaches to Scotus’s doctrine of creation. Common to both their readings is a somewhat Heideggerian20 accusation that Scotus’s thought presents a metaphysics of being that has lost touch with existence itself. Burrell presents a Leibnizian Scotus: “Creation for Scotus, then, can be characterized as God’s choosing among possible configurations of being.” Burrell’s reading, which reduces all to that primordial moment of choosing, concludes that Scotus lacks any genuine consideration of existence which is treated “more like a presupposition than as something properly to be understood,” and so he concludes that “[w]hat can be understood are essences and the relations obtaining among them. Taken collectively, these may be regarded as ‘possible worlds.’”21 In my view, Burrell does not appreciate the richness of Scotus’s conception of the will, as well as the fact that freedom is shared with his creatures. Consequently, the subtle teachings that are encapsulated in Scotus’s metaphysics are unfortunately missed. Similarly, Rudi te Velde distinguishes between Aquinas’s metaphysical scheme, which is rooted in the understanding of being as the actus essendi, according to which “to be” means to act, and that of Scotus, for whom “the general nature of reality [derives] from the perspective of the universal concept of ‘being.’”22 What makes Scotus’s approach so powerful and appealing is that the consideration of being transcends the distinction between the created and uncreated being. Consequently, te Velde concludes, “the ontological consideration of being in general has lost its intrinsic relation to the theological transcendence of being itself.”23 Through a series of investigations, the study will present a “Scotus” who is very much concerned with the question of existence and for whom the question of creation does not end when God picks this world from among other possible worlds. I believe te Velde’s comment is an important one and a central discussion in this study will try to convince the reader that the footprint of the theological transcendence of being is very much alive in Scotistic thought, particularly as it is manifested in the transcendental notions of the True and the Good. Following the Aristotelian doctrine of causation, Aquinas based his analysis of creation on “the resemblance of an effect to its cause.”24 In the wake of the Condemnation of 1277, Scotus reversed the consideration of creation: instead of considering creation from its effects to its cause—that is how oriented—he

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Introduction

analyzed creation starting from the creator to its possible effects, which is why oriented. This shifted the orientation of Scotus’s metaphysics, focusing his thought on the question of contingency as the mark of creation.25 As Ilia Delio explains, “[f]or Scotus, why creation comes about is more important than how creation comes about.”26 Burrell’s words, that “Scotus forbears any attempt to characterize the actual existence of things,”27 misses the most basic Scotistic insight into existence: existence is desired and is good. The existence of created things expresses the act of the will that brings them into being and asserts that they are, essentially, made and will return to the nothing they are made out of.28 This does not mean the how is of no importance, but rather that, from a logical point of view, a proper understanding of this how must come from a prior appreciation of the way the why of creation shapes the questions and their answers. Just as the notion of life becomes lifeless if it is only considered from its biological howness without considering the whyness of life: what it means to be alive in the sense of having an interior life, identity, desires, and history. This changing of the focal point equips us with the basic understanding of why Mary Beth Ingham, in her discussion of Creation, almost immediately discusses God’s love toward his creations, the intrinsic value and uniqueness of each creature, and the dignity of the created order. These, she explains, reveal different perspectives of the beauty of creation.29 A similar shift can be found in Ilia Delio’s book, A Franciscan View of Creation, where her chapter on Scotus is concerned primarily with “the goodness of creation through the lens of the primacy of Christ, the freedom of God, and the contingency of the world.”30 In contrast to Ingham and Delio who wrote their accounts as devout Christians, the present chapters will address Scotus’s treatment of creation not from the point of view of faith but as transcendental investigations that accompany the whyness and whatness of existence and that logically precede any considerations of howness. Rephrasing the words of Boulnois, this study will examine the necessary formal relations of creation, which is fundamentally contingent.31 To Leibniz’s question “why is there something rather than nothing?” that he entitled the “décret absolument absolu” [the absolutely absolute decree],32 Bonaventure and Aquinas gave fundamentally different answers. Aquinas responds that this question is groundless. According to Aquinas, God created freely without a cause “since God’s goodness subsists and is complete independently of other things, and they add no fulfilment to him, there is no necessity about his willing them.”33 However, not being caused does not mean being willed arbitrarily, for God is reasonable both insofar as “the goodness of God is his reason”34 according to which creation is executed, and in the sense that “God’s will is reasonable because he wills one thing to be for the sake of another, not because there is a causal reason for his willing.”35

Introduction

11

Bonaventure’s answer is tied to God’s nature as the highest and most perfect good, and consequently God “wills to produce many things and to share himself,”36 “[for the best] would not be the highest good if it lacked that diffusion actually or even conceptually.”37 However, Bonaventure combines this “efficient principle” of self-giving or self-diffusing with an end which is determined freely by the will, for “the will is the act according to which goodness is turned toward goodness.” Consequently, while the “why” of creation is an essential expression of God’s goodness, the “what” of creation is determined freely as an expression of God’s desire. Like Bonaventure, Scotus approaches God as the highest good and a principle of love; on the other hand his view regarding the why of creation itself is closer to Aquinas’s insofar as creation is contingent in the strongest sense. Following Bonaventure’s distinction between the will as a self-diffusing power, and the will as it desires an object or end, Scotus distinguishes between three production levels in his treatment of the Trinity. Scotus explains that while the Son’s production is performed naturally, i.e., according to necessity, the Holy Spirit’s spiration is performed according to the way of freedom. This creates a severe theological difficulty since it aligns the Holy Spirit with all creation which is a product of the divine will. To distinguish the Holy Spirit from the state of creaturehood, Scotus points out that as opposed to finite creatures, in the spiration of the Holy Spirit there is an adequation between the infinite divine will taken as a power, and the infinity of the willed object. Whereas Bonaventure necessitates God’s self-diffusion in his nature as the highest good, Scotus bases the necessitation on the adequation. He explains: “Therefore I say that the necessity of this production of adequate love—as the necessity of the love which what possesses the will formally loves—is from the infinity of the will and from the infinity of the goodness of the object, because neither without the other is sufficient for necessity.”38 The necessitation of the Holy Spirit is not due to the willing power, nor to the willed object, but rather is a result of the adequation between the infinity of the divine willing power and the infinity of the divine essence, which is the willed object. On the other hand, such an adequation does not exist between the infinite divine will and the creatures as the finite end, and so no cause exists for creation itself.39 However, the formulation itself, which speaks to an adequation or a ratio between the will and the desired object, refers to the desired object as being desired because it is good. Consequently, creation might not be necessitated in any sense, but since it exists as a fact—it is desired and consequently good.

12

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Structure of the Study The study’s methodological prism is that the concept of creation out of nothing is the organizing conceptual leitmotif of Duns Scotus’s ramified writings. By investigating how the idea of creatio ex nihilo governs Scotus’s reinterpretation and subjugation of Aristotle’s thought, a fresh interpretation is given to the science of the transcendentals from which modern intellectual sensibilities crystallized. The nine chapters contain a series of transcendental investigations that follow the presupposition of creation. To describe Scotus’s philosophy in one short sentence, I would say that Scotus is the philosophertheologian of the will. His radical conception of the will directs the outflow of the study, which is ultimately expressed in the idea of creation. The notions discussed in the different chapters, from matter, place, truth, time, freedom, suffering and emotions, causality and information, and finally, personhood, are all woven together through Scotus’s radical conception of the will’s role. Following is a summary of the chapters that comprise this study. 1. Created Matter. Traditionally matter was considered to be an unintelligible and evil entity. Matter, Aristotle explained, was only known by an analogy and through its form. Following the implications of the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo, Duns Scotus maintained that since God created matter and desired it to be, it follows that matter is good and intelligible. Otherwise, it could not be an object of desire. The chapter develops how Scotus’s account contradicts the traditional view of matter and claims that it is both intelligible and actual. 2. Matter as a Being. Following the conclusion of the first chapter, that matter is an intelligible and actual being, matter will be examined transcendentally not simply as created but insofar as it is a being. Scotus holds that the concept of being is univocal, i.e., that the same concept applies to both God and creatures, for otherwise, it loses its meaning. Consequently, the concept of being transcends the distinction between created and uncreated beings. Thus it is based on the same reality of infinite being, which is secondarily differentiated into an infinite perfect (God) and imperfect finite beings (creatures). Examining matter transcendentally under a univocal concept of being, makes it possible to consider the mental and the physical as participating in the same concept of being. Thus, the relation between matter/body and mind can be thought of, not as distinctive, but rather as existing within the purview of the perfection of being. 3. Being Somewhere. This chapter marks a shift from the consideration of the created thing to the will that wills the thing to exist. Whereas the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo of matter directly affected the theological outlook and the

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problem of evil, its impact on the notion of place is not clear. Whereas matter offers itself to the idea of being created, place tricks our minds. Augustine points to the difficulty of emptying one’s thoughts of all objects, for we are still left with “the quality of space” which is not nothing at all. In the vein of Scotus’s conception of place, it will be shown that Scotus distinguishes between necessary elements that apply to place in any possible world and unique features of place that become actual when a specific world comes into existence. In so doing, Scotus anticipates Kant’s discussions of space and time as synthetic a priori truths. 4. Truth and Existence. Creation is based on the will that brings into existence a desired possible world. In harmony with the distinction that was presented in the previous chapter, it can be said that there are truths that are true regardless of which world is brought into being, i.e., that are necessarily true for all possible worlds, and there are truths that become true only in specific worlds that are brought into being. Scotus’s claim that rationality reaches its perfection by the will, forces us to rethink the role of the will in the manifestation of truth in creating this or that world. We demonstrate not only that picking this or that world turns this or that to be true, but how such picking perfects rationality. A subset of truths, that will be called truths of the will, will be shown to be synthetic a priori truths that designate the mode of existence itself and that these truths are fundamental to our ability to comprehend the world. 5. Time and Eternity. As the “quality of space” remains after emptying the mind of all content, time presents the thorny question of what happened before creation. This chapter examines the role of the will in our experience of temporality, specifically, the relationship between the divine and creatures’ wills, and presents a temporal co-creationist paradigm of God and his creatures. 6. Freely Creating Freedom. Creation, ultimately, is the manifestation of God’s freedom. Chapter 6 presents Scotus’s view according to which the ultimate raison d’être of the incarnation is grounded in God himself, and, consequently, creation serves God’s desires. This, however, presents a frightening picture of God who acts as he pleases. Such a God, who created the world for his own reasons, seems to have no obligation (moral, legal, etc.) toward creation itself or to its creatures. In my view, this is unacceptable. If one replaces the omniscient and omnipotent God with “all-knowing” technological entities, e.g., Google, Facebook, and their like, the problem becomes urgent. Following the previous chapter, an attempt is made to harmonize between God’s freedom and his creatures’ freedom and offer a solution in which God’s freedom does not entail the idea that God might act capriciously.

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Introduction

As we will see in chapter 8, the solution allows for perceiving causality under the notion of information. 7. Suffering, Emotions, and Rationality. Chapter 4 examined how Truth and the Will are interwoven in the created world. The current chapter extends that examination to the notion of the Good, for creation is, ultimately, an intentional and free act by the creating God. As opposed to the God of the “philosophers” who remains deaf and silent in all his perfections, the creationist God is not indifferent to the creation that he willed into existence. For otherwise, God would not have created at all. Following the problem of divine impassibility, i.e., of whether the divine nature in Christ could suffer, a transcendental logic of the passions is developed. This is done in order to position man’s feelings not within his physiological structure but rather as an integral part of what it means to be a rational, and specifically, a willing and desiring being. Emotions, it will be argued, must be understood transcendentally as the crown of human rationality and subjectivity. The ongoing attempts to create artificial intelligence, understood from the point of view of computability, misses that which drives thinking itself. 8. Causality, Becoming, and Information. Mechanical philosophy has dominated the modern view of causality since the rise of the scientific revolution. In attempting to reduce reality to mathematical reasoning, teleological causation was castrated, exiled from the realm of the real to be confined within psychological explanations. Following the elaboration of the will as a principle of reality itself, causality is reinterpreted in a manner that restores the role of the will within the framework of information and meaning. 9. Rethinking Personhood: The notion of the person represents the ultimate glory of existence. The last chapter assembles what has been laid out before to construct a new view of what it means to exist, and the relation between the self, the others, and the world. Scotus’s correspondence with the history of personhood and his formulation offers a moral attitude toward all that exist as part of a community of imperfect and limited created beings. Concluding remarks. 1. Though this study primarily accords with Duns Scotus’s thought, ultimately, Scotus functions as an inspiration to understand problems that in some places deviate from the commonly accepted interpretation of Scotus. Consequently, the study does not claim to be an interpretation of Scotus but rather a Scotistic one. 2. The scholarship on Scotus is in an ever-increasing process, and for the right reason. The attempt to unite Scotus’s doctrines in a coherent metaphysical picture does not follow easily. Through the leitmotif of Creation, this study aims to do precisely that. The

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study is deliberately short to not drown in the ever-increasing complications and lose sight of this initial objective. It does not necessarily engage with all that was written on different issues in the secondary literature. One of the liberties I took for the sake of presenting a Scotistic picture was the freedom to deviate from the commonly accepted interpretation of Scotus. 3. This study does not aim to present a history of the doctrine of creation, from Greek thought, through Jewish, early Christian and Gnostic up until this day. Nor will the study be engaged with the discussion of creation that was carried in Scotus’s era. These are all significant issues but will divert us from the study’s philosophical objective: to present the transcendental consequences of the doctrine of creation. 4. In the interest of making the discussion accessible to the reader, quoted material is given in translation for the most part. For the sake of terminological uniformity, quotations are presented mostly according to the Wolter translations (and partners) or my own (without reference).

Chapter 1‌‌‌

Created Matter

The idea of Matter is of that which lies beneath what is perceived. It encapsulates an essential philosophical understanding of a gap between reality-in-itself and reality-as-perceived-by-the-mind.1 This original conception has developed significantly throughout the ages, echoing our understanding of the two realms and the gap between them. Nowadays, when one speaks of matter, it primarily represents the scientific mindset and its view of reality. Matter is spoken of in reference to atoms, subatomic particles, and a complex physical system that governs their behavior. Matter symbolizes the supremacy of the physicalist perception of reality, subordinating the mental realm as its by-product, and viewing the gap as an illusion of the mind. The physicalist supremacy significantly loses its power when matter is considered from the point of view of creation. Understanding the world as one among an endless number of possible creations, turns the howness of creation, physics, into something entirely contingent that speaks little about the nature of reality as such. While the perspective of creation undermines the physicalist aspiration to say something essential about the nature of reality as such, it refocuses our attention on the metaphysical aspects of the notion of matter, as that in which creation comes into being, not as it is materialized in a specific creation, but in any creation. Through the question of creation, the examination of matter transcends the physicalist design moving it to the transcendental one, focusing on the beingness of matter that allows possible creations and their physics to be manifested in it. The aim of this chapter and the following one is to apply the metaphysics of John Duns Scotus to the project of constructing a conception of matter which does not stand in opposition to the mental realm, but rather contains both physical and mental elements. While this chapter presents Scotus’s view of matter as intelligible and actual, the following chapter will further elaborate on the nature of matter in a speculative transcendental manner and will present matter and its functions as a type of memory. This conception of memory both answers ancient questions regarding the applicability of the 17

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intelligible to the unintelligible world and offers a “material” framework by which the information becomes interwoven into the world. What is Matter and what are its functions? These are questions that have been asked since the dawn of philosophy, and as with the dawn of day, both the darkness and nascent light are grasped together. Like other physical issues, Scotus’s conception of matter is rarely discussed. This is no accident, because as Antonie Vos remarks, “for Duns Scotus, physics was not a dominating interest as semantics and logic were.”2 And where Scotus does consider beings of reality, they are most often considered from a metaphysical standpoint. The seminal passages in which Scotus discusses matter include his treatment of individuation, his account of the Eucharist and his conception of place. Whereas the generally excellent study of Richard Cross analyzes matter as a feature of Scotus’s treatment of the physical categories, the chapter will approach matter primarily from a metaphysical standpoint insofar as matter is a being. Without opening the floodgates of a rigorously historical consideration of matter—important work which others have performed—we will begin rather by drawing a fundamental distinction between the Greek and Christian conceptions of matter: According to the Greeks matter is simply there eternally, whereas according to Christianity matter was created by God. This difference does not mean that medieval Christian thinkers held an utterly different conception of matter, but rather that they modified the philosophical conception to suit their theological needs. As such they kept the Greeks’ analysis of matter as that which remains after the thing ceases to be, and which is responsible for all processes of becoming and change, i.e., as that being of potency which makes it possible for things to become actual.3 Scotus, summarizing Aristotle’s arguments for the existence of matter, explains that when anything is transformed from one thing into another, matter “remain[s] the same under each of the opposites.”4 Averroes adds that it is the change of material things which makes matter known, just as a transformation in place makes place known.5 Scotus further explains that while matter in itself is known to God, our intellect is unable to “comprehend neither most perfect nor least perfect things in the totality of their true being.” While our mind comes to know the “most perfect things” through their capacity to produce effects, diminished beings (entia deminuta) become known only by way of analogy to other more perfect things. Scotus explains that our conception of matter is composed “out of the forms, which are of other principles of operation” than matter. Through these forms we attain analogical knowledge of matter “as receptive to the received,”6 so that only matter in itself is unintelligible for us. We come to know matter rather “through its disposition or capacity to receive form.” The being which receives, i.e., matter, is distinguished from

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that which is received, the form; that which receives maintains its identity, while that which is received changes.7 Whereas the Greeks presupposed matter as a being there, which is absolutely undifferentiated and unpenetrated, Scotus, as a Christian thinker, contends that although we do not know matter substantially pro statu isto, the act of its creation makes it necessary that matter be knowable to God, and therefore knowable in itself. Scotus directly addresses those who claim that matter is known only through the form, and that in itself it is unknowable and unintelligible.8 Scotus responds that matter is something which is a being, and thus cannot come into existence of itself; it follows that God must hold an idea of matter, which he subsequently wills into being. For if matter is not a being in itself, and thus knowable, the creation of matter would be impossible, implying that matter existed prior to the act of creation. Scotus explains that in God there is a distinction between intelligibles within the divine mind which serve as a principle of production, and which will come into existence at some point in time, and other intelligibles which will never come into existence. The former are called exemplars or ideas whereas the latter are called concepts.9 Assuming this division, Scotus presents the view of “other” philosophers who argued that things which will never come into being do not entail any idea in the divine mind, since they “do not correspond to any specific difference of being.” As a result, they argued that matter cannot correspond to an idea in the divine mind since matter “does not exist on its own, nor it can be known in itself, and therefore no other idea corresponds to it apart from the idea of the composite.”10 Scotus answers that prior to the act of the divine will there is no difference between a practical idea and a speculative concept since in such a state there is no difference between something which is meant to become and something which is not. For if prior to the act of the will something is distinguished from another with respect to its future existence, then the will is deprived of choosing to act, either to bring or not to bring something into being.11 It follows that the idea of matter in the divine mind, like other ideas, is indifferent to future existence, and consequently that the idea of matter is really distinguished from all other ideas within the divine mind. Scotus concludes that if God wished, he could create matter existing without form. This claim is based not upon positive knowledge regarding matter or the soul, for no one has witnessed them separately, but rather upon the fact that “[m]atter is essentially prior to form, because the former is the foundation of the latter, from which the latter is drawn out; therefore for matter to exist, or to be able to exist by itself, does not involve a contradiction.”12 And since according to Scotus, God can bring anything into existence which does not contain a contradiction, it follows that it is possible for matter to exist without a form.

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We may draw the following conclusions from what has been said so far. 1. Though we do not know the nature of matter in itself, we know that matter as a principle that carries changes, is required as a transcendental condition for the creation of a changeable physical world insofar as it is changeable physically.13 2. Since the act of bringing into being presupposes the idea of what is brought into being (whether it is matter, man or a chair), it follows that the idea of matter in the divine mind, prior to its actual creation, is subject to whatever logic applies to any thinkable object within the divine mind. 3. Since matter can exist in itself, it follows that matter can be understood as a thing which possesses being, and is implicated in everything that can be truthfully said of the being of existence qua being of existence. Scotus’s conception of matter builds on a Franciscan-Augustinian tradition and particularly on the thought of Henry of Ghent. As Antonie Cote notes, Scotus’s views coincide with this school in the following points:14 1. As opposed to Aquinas, both Henry and Scotus hold that matter is something that carries a positive quiddity. Though this does not mean that Aquinas understands matter to be nothing, granting matter some positive quiddity does however make it possible for Scotus and Henry to consider it as a being, which Aquinas cannot.15 2. Both Henry and Scotus think that God can cause matter to subsist without form and consequently that God holds within him an idea of the material. Henry, probably responding to the view of Giles of Rome, explains that matter cannot be treated as a non-being,16 since “it receives exis­tence in itself insofar as it has its own proper divine idea within the divine mind.”17 A three-fold structure of existence is realized in matter: 1. Existence as such (esse simpliciter) insofar as matter is created by God. 2. Matter as capable of receiving forms. 3. Matter as actualized by the form in the composite of real beings. Whereas the first two modes can actually exist insofar as God keeps them in existence directly, the third can exist by its own means.18 In a later treatment, Henry distinguishes between the being of essence and the being of existence, explaining that, “[t]he being of essence is . . . a disposition of a thing in itself by which it is what it is and nothing other than itself, related indifferently to anything else to be attributed to it.”19 The being of existence, on the other hand, is actual being that “has been acquired by the essence” and is distinguished into two kinds: diminished within the mind, i.e., concepts, and being which exists outside the mind “which is said to be the true being of the things.” Extra-mental being is further divided into “esse existentiae simpliciter” such as matter and form, and “esse subsistentiae” “which is the being of a thing that is a supposite subsisting in itself.” Thus Henry concludes that matter and form “do not have the full actuality of existence, because they exist as parts united in the whole, and a part in a whole, as such, has being in potency, not in act.” Only the composite, which holds

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a supposite, “has being distinct and separate from anything else, and in that way it has being completely in act and the complete actuality of its existence, which is said to be the being of subsistence.”20 While Henry distinguished initially between essential and existential beings, and only secondarily between being within the mind and that which is outside of it, Scotus anchors his primary division in the distinction between being within the mind and being outside the mind.21 While things outside the mind are constructed as real objects, ontologically speaking, mental things in the soul do not have their own absolute being but have being only in a manner of speaking (esse secundum quid), i.e., “in so far as [they are] related to the soul as the foundation of that being in the soul (esse in anima).”22 Mental things do not have their own being absolutely but rather only secondarily; in other words, their actuality is based upon the thinking subject. Whereas Henry views matter as an esse existentiae simpliciter that can be actualized only as a composite together with a form, and is in itself deprived of a principle of actuality, Scotus explains that this cannot be the case, for then “everything composed is composed out of something and nothing.”23 To avoid this absurdity, matter must be considered as an actual being. A challenge now arises for Scotus to explain how matter, which exists simply in itself, can also join with form to create a composite which consists of its own unity. His answer follows Aristotle, who “distinguishes between unity of identity and between unity of the composition.”24 In order to explain the cohesion of these two unities, Scotus maintains that matter consists of twofold potency: 1. as a term of a potency which does not have being, but has the potency to be, e.g., as the Antichrist is said to be in potency. 2. as the subject of potency to something else, i.e., as in the capacity of a subject to receive forms. The first is called by Scotus objective potency whereas the latter is called subjective potency25 which is a “potency in a secondary sense.”26 Matter is an actual being which is “a being in potency to all acts which it is able to receive.”27 Scotus examines Henry’s distinctions between the three types of realities: opinable (realitatem opinabilem, capable of being thought according to res as reor/reris), quidditative, and of existence (possessing ratitudo according to ratus/rata/ratum).28 Scotus agrees with Henry that impossible things possess no real being29 but only a fictitious being.30 Following his criticism of Henry’s distinction between the being of essence and of existence, Scotus maintains that Henry simply misunderstood the duality encapsulated in the dual meaning of ratified being31 1. as “it has from itself firm and true being.”32 2. as its formal content does not contain an internal repugnancy: “ex se ens ratum.” When the first sense of actually existing being is applied, then a thing such as man is not of himself “a valid being but from efficient cause” and thus “there is never a valid being unless existing.”33 Honnefelder explains that in

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this sense of ens ratum, it is a ratified being only insofar as it is caused and really exists.34 Nevertheless, when a being is understood in the second sense, the only thing determining whether something possesses ens ratum is whether its formal content includes an internal repugnancy or not. Scotus argues against Henry that he has simply misunderstood the latter kind of ens ratum as non-repugnance to being by concluding that the eternal understanding of a stone in the divine mind, for example, requires a second type of being for its subsistence.35 It follows that the dual structure that was found in both thinking and non-thinking beings is grounded in these two levels of ens ratum. The first, which might be called the objective sense of ens ratum, is taken according to its reality and is a product of causation or creation. The second sense, which might be called the subjective sense of ens ratum, is taken according to its whatness, which is not caused or created by an external agent but rather follows by necessity insofar as the being contains no internal contradiction and as such is a legitimate object for thought (or computation). Matter in itself is not an ens ratum, but rather an ens ratum qualified to suit material things. Matter, when deprived of actualization, is deprived only in regard to material forms but not insofar (1) as it meets the firmness that is required of an ens ratum qua ens ratum; (2) as it grounds the process of generation and corruption. It thus follows that the privation of form does not entail an inner contradiction, nor does it prevent matter from remaining open to future actualization. The particular privation, which contains no contradiction, is all that is required to claim that God could create matter separately from form. Nevertheless, since a composite thing is composed of matter and form, and since Scotus argued earlier that “everything composed is composed out of something and nothing,”36 it follows not only that matter is an absolute thing that can exist separately, but also that the substantial form of material things can exist separately. This is a perplexing outcome, for while one can visualize, in a way, how matter could exist separately from form, it is not clear what it means that material forms can exist without matter. One of the arguments for the separate existence of matter was that God must have a distinct idea of matter in his mind, since otherwise the creation of matter would not be possible. Similarly, one could argue that God must have a distinct idea of substantial material form in his mind, for otherwise no substantial material forms could be actualized in material composites. Scotus’s argument regarding the separability of matter from form, claims that matter is really distinct from form, i.e., that form is also really distinct from matter:37 “not only that matter is, but that it really differs from the form, because the opposite is not changed in the opposite.”38 This claim that form and matter are really distinct is of great importance, and according to Richard Cross it was intended

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by Scotus to counter the position of Richard of Middleton who held that “a species of substance is just matter existing in a particular mode, such that a different mode of existing is a sufficient condition for sortal difference.”39 Cross explains that Scotus does not accept the view that an arrangement of matter can explain sortal difference. Putting it differently, if what characterizes prime matter is its indifference to generation and corruption, then it follows that although it can harbor forms, they cannot be reduced to it.40 This claim for a real distinction between matter and form does not, however, entirely suffice to ground the possibility that matter can be created separately from form. Scotus is aware of this problem and says: “I say that matter is less dependent on bodily form than material form is on matter, since it is prior by origin—even though form is more perfect. And hence there is no likeness.”41 It seems however that this same argument deprives the forms of the possibility of existing separately, since it implies that material forms are dependent upon matter, i.e., whereas matter is an absolute being which is not dependent upon another being, substantial material forms are relative beings which are dependent upon matter.42 The brief argument presented by Scotus against this claim, which unfortunately he never elaborated, states that if forms were relative beings, then substantial change would be less perfect than accidental change. And since Scotus holds that this is not the case, it follows that substantial material forms cannot be relative beings. It is then surprising to find Scotus saying, just after presenting the argument of the priority of origination of matter to the substantial material forms that “since form is not the formal cause of matter . . . nor matter the material cause of form, but of the composite; and since each is an absolute being, I concede that both of them can exist without the other, and neither is this corporeal form of the immaterial, because though it is in a separate state, in itself it is not averse to being perfected by matter.”43 It is thus not clear how Scotus brings together 1. the argument for the non-dependency of matter, based upon priority of origination, and 2. the claim that substantial material forms are not relative beings and are independent of matter as well. Cross clearly expresses his frustration by saying that “[w]hether or not the view that the forms of material substance are individuals can be successfully defended is not clear to me.”44 This is indeed what one may call a serious problem, for it seems that the two claims are grounded in different and irreconcilable arguments. In attempting to resolve this difficulty, matter will be examined in the following chapter as an ens inquantum ens, i.e., what applies to it insofar as it is a being, and will be viewed not simply as a material entity but as a memory.

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The term information has become increasingly central in different fields, such as physics, biology, computer science, and more.45 However, its usage and designations vary somewhat, each iteration designed to answer the field’s specific needs. Paraphrasing the words of Aristotle in Metaphysics Γ, information is said in many ways. Some, like Spang-Hanssen, hold that “we are not obliged to accept the word information as a professional term at all. It might be that this word is most useful when left without any formal definition, like the word discussion, or the word difficulty, or the word literature.”46 Focusing on information technology rather than information per se, allows us to postpone the need to clearly define our understanding of information. Instead, we will approach information technology primarily as the mechanism that shapes our mentality and approach to reality. And yet, historical perspective sheds important light on the original use of the term and the meaning that accompanied it. Tracing the Latin origin of the term, and its usage to designate Greek terms such as eidos and morphe, Capurro shows that it primarily had a dual designation: an ontological one, where the matter (hyle) is informed by the form (morphe), and an epistemological one, that focuses on the communication of knowledge.47 From the fourteenth century onward, as the Scholastic way of thinking gradually lost its dominance, the ontological meaning became a remnant of the past. This echoes the decline of the Aristotelian hylomorphic metaphysics in favor of the dualistic Cartesian one, that categorically distinguished between the res extensa and the res cogitans.48 What is revolutionary about the information revolution is not the ability to communicate information—that has been dramatically perfected—but rather the revival of the ontological sense of information. What were at first computational entities, transmitting and manipulating information between like-minded computers, has turned into an ever-increasing synthesis between the material world and thinking capacities, transforming them into information entities. The ontological meaning of information has been restored in the most radical sense. Contrary to the gnostic-dualistic approach to reality, perceiving God as the creator of all that exists demanded a reconsideration of matter not simply as being there but rather as a subjective potency that, by its nature, can actualize forms. The attempt to bridge the Scholastic framework and information conception of reality, lies in understanding subjective potency as an information entity that facilitates both senses of information.

Chapter 2‌‌‌

Matter as Memorial Entity

The previous discussion aimed to understand how the notion of creation altered the Aristotelian conception of prime matter.1 Perceiving matter as created renders it as intelligible in itself that can be actualized without a form. This chapter will explore the ontological consequences that derive from the understanding that matter is a being and will present matter as memorial or information entity. Scotus is famous for claiming that the concept of being should be understood as a univocal concept, i.e., that the same concept is applicable both to God and to creatures though in different intrinsic modes or intensities.2 Consequently, the concept of being transcends the distinction between created and uncreated being, and is based on one and the same reality of infinite being, that is secondarily refined into a distinction between the infinite perfect (God) and imperfect finite being (creatures).3 This opens up the possibility of approaching matter not simply as created but also as having a transcendental perspective since both matter and God are beings. This approach exploits the ontological aspect of matter as a qualified ens ratum and so, rather than continuing the bottom-up line of expanding the Aristotelian conception of matter, a top-down examination is undertaken, where the top is occupied by God and the bottom by matter. It is important to note that, on the one hand, such a reading does not contradict our reflection on the Aristotelian conception of matter, and on the other hand, it is equally important in that it supplies us with new vocabulary to address matter and its problems in a way that was not available when assuming the purely Aristotelian concept. The two conditions of substantial material forms that were presented at the end of the last chapter seem to contradict one another: (1) that there is a dependency of the substantial material forms upon matter, and (2) that this dependency does not imply that material forms are relative beings. The following will present an exercise that is guided by the idea that if all beings share a common notion of being, then matter can be seen as a deprived thinking being. To solve the conundrum, we will examine how these aspects are resolved in the way God thinks about his objects of thought. Then, we will try 25

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to qualify to how material forms can be actualized independently of matter. The divine mind is thus taken as a perfect model through which matter can be understood. This exercise is tedious, and the transmission downward from God’s mind to matter is presented in brackets. The following point will be argued: 1. The relationship between the divine act of thinking and its objects of thought has structural similarities to the relation between the act of matter “thinking” its essence, and substantial material forms. 2. Just as the divine ideas are produced only virtually, the substantial material forms are only virtually contained by matter. 3. The actualization of substantial material forms do not necessarily require matter to be actualized. After discussing God’s[//matter’s//] primary object of intellection, the divine essence [//the material essence],4 Scotus asks whether there are other things or objects in the divine[//material//] understanding.5 He maintains that there are such secondary objects, though while the divine intellect[//matter//] is moved by its primary object, it is not moved by such secondary objects since they are finite and the finite cannot alter the infinite [//matter remains indifferent to its forms//].6 Scotus explains that secondary objects, which are incapable of moving the intellect, can relate to the intellect as things “terminating an act of a potency.”7 Such termination can occur in two ways: Either (1) as its proper notion, as when the sensible terminates the sensual act; or (2) when “it is included in the notion of another object that terminates the act of that potency primarily.” As an example of the second case, Scotus suggests an object of the common sense which stands in a secondary relation to the sensual act.8 The first way by which an object terminates an act of potency is inapplicable to the divine intellect, for such an object “is necessarily required for that act,” and according to Scotus, nothing which is created and finite can be required by an infinite act.9 Scotus therefore endorses the second explanation according to which created finite intelligibles terminate the divine intellectual act only secondarily as included in the divine essence [//secondary determination can apply to matter such as shape or volume//].10 Termination by secondary objects is not necessary for the first act of intellection but rather follows it and depends upon it. Scotus maintains that there are distinct relations of reasons in the divine mind.11 The question is whether they are necessary in order for God[//matter//] to have distinct knowledge of his objects [//or for matter to receive the forms//]. At first blush, Scotus seems to recognize the need for such relations, even preferring a view that “places these ideal relations in the essence qua object of knowledge . . . not [as it is] in itself, but as known.”12 This view holds that the divine essence can function as a principle of distinctiveness since “the relations are present insofar as God grasps Him­self as imitable.”13 Nevertheless, after seeming to endorse this solution to the problem, Scotus goes on to reject the need for relations altogether: “if that by which an external

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object is known . . . were limited to that object of cognition, the latter could be known through it distinctly without any conceptual relation.”14 Scotus means that these relations are simply not necessary for God to have knowledge of creatures—and thus the examination of the various opinions regarding the problem becomes unnecessary. Against all these opinions Scotus argues as follows: Presume that God indeed requires relations of reasons in order to know his objects. By what means they are known to God? His answers: either through themselves, or through other principles or relations, or through the divine essence. If they are known through themselves, then the divine intellect would be moved by something other than itself, which is impossible. If by other relations, then the causal chain will continue ad infinitum. And if through the divine essence, then these relations are not really required in the first place.15 Scotus provides an account of the production of secondary objects by describing four “instants” characterizing the divine mind: God in the first instant understands his own essence under merely absolute reason; in the second instant he produces a stone into intelligible being and understands it, so that there is a relation in the understood stone to the divine intellection, but there is not yet any relation in the divine intellection to the stone, . . . in the third instant . . . the divine intellect can compare its own intellection to any other intelligible to which we can compare it, and then by comparing itself to the intellected stone, it can cause in itself a relation of reason; in the fourth instant the relation that was caused in the third instant can be quasi-reflected, and then that relation of reason will be known. Thus no relation of reason is therefore necessary for understanding a stone.16

The first moment of beatific intellection seems comprehensible [//equivalent to the existence of matter in itself whereby it “thinks” its essence//].17 The problem arises with the subsequent moments. If secondary objects are understood in the second moment, what need is there to compare them to the divine essence as understood? In the prologue, Scotus describes a similar process and explains that while “in the second moment of nature the quiddities contain virtually proper truths, in the third moment these virtual and contained truths are known to God.”18 Scotus distinguishes between the knowing of the quiddities, which occurs in the second moment, and the knowing of their truths, which are contained only virtually in the second moment [//in the second moment the forms are potentially within matter while in the fourth moments the forms are actualized//]. Whereas the third moment marks a reflective act, the second moment naturally and unreflectedly “produces a stone in understood being, . . . [as a] term.”19 As we have seen, Scotus explains that the secondary object can relate to the intellect as a thing “terminating an act

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of a potency,” according to the second type [//explains the dependency of substantial material forms on matter//]. This dependency does not imply real containment, but “is included in the notion of another object that terminates the act of that potency primarily.”20 The example of an object of the common sense sheds light on this point. The common sense is a faculty that provides a meta-analysis of the sensual data. Whereas the proper sensibles are the proper object of the senses, e.g., hot and cold, black or white, the common sensibles are discerned by a comparison between the proper sensibles such as motion or shape. While the eye perceives only color, for instance, by terminating the color the common sense perceives the shape of the boundaries of that color. These shapes are not real things nor are they parts of the color perceived, but rather they are produced from color as terminated and ordered in a specific arrangement. This explains why Scotus speaks of production and understanding, which appear to constitute two distinct moments, as a single moment. Whereas shapes are perceived simultaneously with the perception of color, the understanding of the truth of these shapes, e.g., as a triangle with all its properties, requires a different act of knowing according to the measurement of truth. So whereas in the second moment the shape of the thing is perceived in the thing and so absolutely, in the third and fourth moments, the truth of the thing is perceived in relation to the measurement of truth. Just as the common sense produces21 common terms through the primary sensibles, the production of the secondary objects is achieved through the understood/perceived divine essence [//matter//].22 Just like shape, which is merely derivative and is perceived together with the color, so also the secondary objects, while being only terms of the understood divine essence, are perceived together with the understanding of the divine essence [//the act of matter conceiving the material essence//]. These secondary known “objects have being in a qualified sense, namely objective being,”23 and are what Scotus calls diminished beings. They are not cancelled beings, but rather beings in a certain respect, just as an accident has being in a certain respect through its substance.24 The primary object [//the divine essence in this case but can be applied to man or matter as well//], acts as a “moving reason” (ut ratio movens)25 which moves the intellect [//matter//] itself, and is that in which the secondary objects are perceived. It acts as a mirror which lends to the secondary objects a virtual being through reflection. The discussion of the divine thought has demonstrated the following: 1.  The relationship between the divine act of thinking and its secondary object has structural similarities to the relation between the act of matter “thinking” its essence and its secondary object, i.e., substantial material forms. This becomes more apparent when one compares this to how the central processing unit (CPU) “thinks” its secondary objects, which

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are reflected in its continuous act of thinking, that never stands still. In itself the CPU continuously carries specific logical computations, not noticing the algorithmic outcome it produces. It simply acts as a computational matter, carrying the computation forward one step at a time. 2.  Although divine ideas are dependent upon the divine act of thinking whereby God thinks about himself, they are produced only virtually. Similarly, substantial material forms are only virtually contained by matter. The intelligibles are dependent upon the act of intellection or calculation that actualizes them. But this actualization speaks nothing about their intelligible constitution, which can be actualized by any thinking agent that can recall or calculate them. 3.  The third and fourth moments, during which the divine mind relates and reflects the divine ideas, are distinguished from the second moment insofar as it explicates and actualizes what lies within it potentially, i.e., it actualizes these forms as considered forms. Thus it is possible to say that the actualization of a substantial material form does not necessarily require matter to be actualized (although it is not repugnant to it) and that a pure actualization by the divine mind can actualize form perpetually, as opposed to actual material things, which are characterized by generation and corruption. Augustine, who substantially shaped Scotus’s thought, spoke of the divine trinity as memory, intelligence, and will. The father, as that from whom, the Son, who intellects, and the Spirit, which is spirated by the father and the son. Like the divine trinity, the memory, intellect and will share the same essence, but manifest it differently. In a similar way, matter understood as memory, can also act as intelligence, and ultimately, for conscious beings, as will. Scotus explains three ways to understand the memory: Memory, or the intellect functioning as memory, can be taken in three ways: in one way as conserving the species of the past things as past. . . . In another way as conserving the species representing the objects in themselves, whether they really exist or not. . . . A third way is insofar as [the memory] has some principle whereby it elicits actual knowledge, which, however, does not stay there without a second act.26

Let us now compare the human and divine minds against matter to determine whether and how Scotus’s account of memory can be applied to matter. The first type of memory, which is in accord with the common understanding of memory, functions as the conserver of past events as they have occurred. In this sense matter does indeed conserve the past insofar as it enables past events to be written/received into it. It is important to note that the past written into matter is accidental to it, and matter itself does not act as an agent

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but only as a receptacle of the past. The act of storing the past in matter requires either an agent or an accidental causal act that leave their mark in it. Moreover, it is clear that different compositions of matter and form are more or less suited to preserve past events and thus that the form is responsible for the degree of perfection of conservation, though it is matter which makes such conservation possible at all. The second type of memory maintains the species or forms as standing alone and for themselves. This kind of memory can be of two sub-types. The first is logical or computational. A thing can be “remembered” insofar as it does not contain a contradiction. As such it is a legitimate possible object of thought and calculation. It can be the idea of a table or any possible number. The second is what can be called transcendental remembering. This transcendental remembering serves to explain how one can hold existential knowledge that is not factually grasped, for example the fact that one was born. In Scotus words: “I know I was born, or that the world was created, [though] I don’t remember either, for I recall no act of mine that had this or that as its object.”27 Such truths cannot be deduced a posteriori, nor can they reside within us simply as innate. If they could, we would be able to perceive them within us, which would condition them temporally; but the situation requires a different kind of remembering. It is our existential conditioning as limited beings through which we “remember” such necessary truths. Applying this to our present discussion, we can say that the capacity of matter to receive any material form is equivalent to recalling such a form from its logical and transcendental memories. Both the first and second types of memory are about conserving, either logically or transcendentally (as is the case with material forms which are contained in memories that are indifferent to existence), or conserving as “is required in order to be present as past.” The third type of memory is responsible for intellection, i.e., for eliciting actual knowledge, and must be understood according to its essential and accidental characters. By way of example, Scotus writes that “wood warms per accidens”: just as warming is not the wood’s essential act but only an accidental one (being wood is the wood’s essential act), in a similar way the act of intellection/recollection is the essential act of the intellect/ memory, whereas the reception of the particular intellection by the possible intellect is accidental, as with the reception of some warmth which is “productive per accidens.”28 These dual productions correspond to Scotus’s discussion of proximate and remote objects according to which the intellect first intuits itself and through itself remembers the remote object as an event that has taken place. They also correspond to two types of relations within the memory. 1) A mutual relation to the necessary proximate object, which is of the second mode of relation like that “of generated to generating.” 2) A non-mutual relation to the remote accidental object, which is of the third

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mode of relation as “declaring to declared.”29 Scotus compares these dual relations within the memory to the production of images in a mirror which “would formally be in the mirror, but effectively would produce knowledge in the eye”:30 as a mirror it embodies a mutual relation of mirror-mirrored, while the knowledge perceived in the mirror is but an accidental knowledge that the mirror reflects.31 The act of remembering contains a mutual relation with its primary object of remembering, the self, and a non-mutual relation with the objects remembered. The non-mutuality relation to the remote accidental object grounds the possibility for the thinking subject to act freely as the superior cause toward its secondary objects. The act by which an object is stored and recollected by the memory constitutes the object in such a way that it holds a non-mutual relation to the intellect, for the memory holds a mutual relation only to its proximate object (“the mirror” which it intuits) and a non-mutual remote relation to the accidental memorized objects, the objects reflected in the mirror. The will, which must will, is in a mutual relation with the memory, from which it receives objects through the act of recollection.32 The mutuality is expressed by the fact that the will’s consideration is stored as a “memory of consideration by the will.” On the other hand, the objects which the will considers are already constituted in such a way that they are accidental remote non-mutual objects, and so hold no power of determination over the will.33 The same natural and dual act by which the intellect abstracts and presents the will together with its objects of consideration (as intellected objects) is also a necessary precondition for the possibility of the will considering its objects in such a way that it is not determined to choose one or the other. This indeterminateness is what makes it possible for the intellect to assemble different possible compositions of the objects in “the mirror.” This duality, whereby the secondary object is reflected in the primary object, is essential for the constitution of the self and for establishing a consciousness of diachronic identity, whereby the self perceives itself to be the same person at different times, and has responsibility for its past actions. This means that within the secondary object, it is not only the object that is remembered, but also the recollected self that is absorbed into the perceiving subject.34 Whereas Plato’s doctrine of remembrance presented a mythological forgetting whereby the soul forgets its primordial knowledge of the ideas, Scotus’s remembrance doctrine is grounded within the subject’s act of thinking where one intuits one’s own self and through which the intelligibles are remembered transcendentally. There is no need for a mythology to explain our ability to “remember” the ideas. Nor is there any need to picture matter as some sort of villain. In fact, though of lesser perfection, the distance between thinking beings and matter is not as distant as it used to be. In the case of thinking

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beings, intuitive cognition35 unites the two conserving types of memories into an act of recollection, and through it thinking beings intuit their own selves as that which accompanies the act of recollection. Matter, on the contrary, is deprived of such active and free power and is thus incapable of extracting anything or anyone from itself. Matter is passive and only allows external casual acts to actualize it by means of recollections which “use” it while remaining external to it. Since matter is deprived of activity, it follows that it is also deprived of the ability to act freely in respect to “remembered” forms, and thus is totally subordinated to the realm of natural necessity. Due to matter’s total passivity, the recollection is not its recollection; it does not hold a genitive relation with respect to the form in question, nor does it belong to it. Matter could be said to behave like a servant that receives messages, but out of indifference simply does not read their contents. Matter is an It. For that reason, matter is capable only of what Scotus calls an imperfect memory, which refers to a potential act of memory, whereas thinking beings are capable of perfect acts of memory, which bring the act of remembering, in its fullness, into act. Matter is a deprived thinking being which is capable of conserving past events as well as possessing the capacity to receive all material forms. With respect to the four movements of divine thought, matter can be said to be deprived of the third and fourth moments described above as taking place in thinking beings, i.e., relating and reflecting. As a result, the active power whereby matter thinks its essence does not allow it to recall conserved memories. Thus while the active power of thinking beings, also called active potency, makes it possible for them to expand themselves beyond themselves, matter’s active power is capable only of “thinking” itself, it is a merely passive potency. This act of thinking itself is a genitive act that cannot be transmitted, it is incommunicable. It cannot be transmitted, not due to some non-intelligibility, but as its constitutive property.36 It thus becomes clear why Scotus does not consider the ideas of matter and form to be of the same kind, for they belong to different type of intelligible beings. Form is thinkable being whereas matter belongs, though deprived, to thinking beings. Incommunicability is common to all thinking beings insofar as their constitution is such that they think only themselves; no thinking being can think the thinking act of another as its own. As a result, it turns out that the unknowability of matter is not a result of the unintelligibility of matter, but rather is common to all thinking beings, even though matter is the most deprived type of thinking being. Divine intellect, human intellect, and matter are similar insofar as they possess the capacity to actualize ideas. While the divine mind is infinite, the human mind and matter are finite. Whereas the divine and human minds are active and free, and so can actualize every potential idea, matter is only active in regard to its essence and subordinated

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to external actualizations, either through causal effects (from natural agents) or through creation (God). In any event, the unknowability of matter becomes equivalent to the unknowability of any other person, whether human or divine, and results from their incommunicability.

The first two chapters offer a new perspective on thinking about material beings. They are indeed subordinate to the laws of physics, but, metaphysically speaking, they are more than that. To be material means first and foremost to be a memory-like entity that can store the past within it, take shape, recollect, intellect, and will itself. While they are made of matter, from particles, along with their endless interconnections, what they do as entities is conserve memory, information and shapes, and recollect and communicate them. Scotus’s discussion of memory as well as the distinction he draws between objective and subjective potency, offers an ontological framework to distinguish between an actualization of form or information, and the type of being that can store within it unactualized information. There is no essential difference between the storing device and the information entity that allows seamless extraction and communication of information. Whereas the information itself is indifferent to the way it is stored in the world, information entities are not simply stored in universal computational entities. Their operating system and hardware allow them to connect not only to computational networks such as the internet, but to the world itself, equipped with the ability to sense and act within it. Information technology distinguishes between the ontological and epistemological senses of information—that is, between the information entities as they exist and operate—and the information they carry. But even more importantly, the distinction between communicability and incommunicability allows us to distinguish between communicable information operations that can be copied and executed on demand, and the unique added incommunicable aspect. The key to information agency lies in the ability to assemble information in a manner that constitutes the subject’s unique perspective through which the subject gains its position in the world and its relations to others.

Chapter 3‌‌‌

Being Somewhere

The question of place and how one is present in a place is not an archaic question. The ever-evolving technology fundamentally alters the way we are situated in the world and the manner in which we operate.1 Technology, and particularly information technology, minimizes the corporeal restrictions of our body, allowing the mind to transcend its limitations, and to execute causal processes solely according to the will’s desires. In so doing, we find ourselves acting and communicating at a distance, commanding our will to operate on numerous distant devices simultaneously, and extending our presence far beyond our material body. In other words, technology allows us to act like what the medievals referred to as the angels. In The Fate of Place, David Casey explains that the myths of early creationists spoke of that-from-which-the-world-was-created both materially, insofar as it is that-from-which it was made, but also as that-from-where, or in-where it was made. Summarizing the account of Genesis 1, Casey writes that “creation is not only of place . . . but cannot occur without place, including its own place-of-creation. The act of creating takes place in place.”2 Whereas the doctrine of creatio ex nihilo of matter directly affected the theological horizon and the problem of evil, its impact on the notion of place is not clear, as is manifested in the general silence of the secondary literature. Whereas matter offers itself to the idea of being created, place seems to play tricks on our mind. In Book VII.I of the Confessions, Augustine recounts the difficulties he faced in the process of attaining a proper understanding of God. He explains that though he stopped seeing God as having the shape of a human body, no alternative way of thinking occurred to him. Augustine continues: My heart cried out in vehement protest against all the phantom shapes that thronged my imagination, and I strove with this single weapon to beat away from the gaze of my mind the cloud of filth that hovered round me, but hardly had I got rid of it than in another twinkling of an eye it was back again, clotted together, invading and clogging my vision, so that even though I was no longer 35

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hampered by the image of a human body, I was still forced to imagine something corporeal spread out in space, whether infused into the world or even diffused through the infinity outside it. . . . because anything to which I must deny these spatial dimensions seemed to me to be nothing at all, absolutely nothing, not even a void such as might be left if every kind of body—earthly, watery, aerial or heavenly—were removed from it, for though such a place would be a nothingness, it would still have the quality of space.3

Accepting Parmenides’s words that nothing comes out of nothing (ex nihilo nihil fit), some might have a problem with the intelligibility of the idea that matter was created by God out of absolutely nothing. On the other hand, no one has any problem visualizing such creation of matter. The problem that Augustine raised in the passage above—the difficulty of emptying one’s thoughts of all objects—expresses the lack of ability to think about nothing in itself, for we are left with “the quality of space” which is not nothing at all. A similar thing happens to us when we try to think about time before the creation of the world. These problems result from the fact that space and time are essential to the manner we think. As we try to empty the world of its created objects or roll back creation to its beginning, place and time present themselves as non-nothings that are “there,” at least in a logical transcendental sense, before things come into actual being. In the following, we will examine Scotus’s account of place. This transcendental account of the possibility for things to take place, in the mind and in the world, offers an intelligible way to cope with the difficulty Augustine presented, and reveals an important thread through which the other chapters develop. Like the notion of matter, the notion of place carries with it long philosophical and theological heritage.4 Pierre Duhem explains that, according to Scotus, place expresses the “relation between two terms, the contained body and the containing body.”5 Following Aristotle’s account, Scotus defines place as “the outermost containing boundary of the contained, that is, place is the immediate container of the corporeal.”6 Lang explains that Averroes’s interpretation of Aristotle suggested a strong relation between the place and the body that could not be considered apart. This, according to Cross, is due to the proximity between the extension of the body and the space that the body occupies, which might lead us to consider them identical. However, he goes on to argue that they belong to different categories for “the extension of a body pertains to the category of quantity, whereas the relation of the body to the space it occupies pertains to the category of place.”7 This categorical difference represents the relation between the containing thing or body which lodges, locare, the place, and that which is lodged, locari, the contained body. That which is lodged by place is designated by Scotus as ubi. Place is thus grounded by the containing body, whereas ubi is grounded by the contained

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body. In addition to this distinction, Scotus also uses positio, which refers to the order of the parts of the contained body in relation to the parts of the containing body or place.8 Positio is responsible for Scotus’s claim that extension “entails an order of parts in a whole, such that one part exists ‘outside’ other parts.”9 Scotus formulates five relationships within Aristotle’s conception of place: 1. to be in place of actuality, i.e., that the place is really distinct from the contained body. 2. to be in a determined place because of equality of the bodies, i.e., equality of the surface size. 3. that the parts of the contained body correspond to the parts of the containing body. 4. to be in a place in determinate manner as excluded from another. 5. to be in place naturally or violently.10 As Suarez-Nani notes, whereas the first four relations treat the body as a quantum, only the fifth relates to it as a natural entity.11 Adopting this distinction between a body taken as a quantum and a body taken naturally, Scotus lays the groundwork for a break with the Aristotelian conception of place.12 According to Aristotelian physics, body requires place, while place is independent of body. The primacy of sub lunar place to body grounds the absolute immobility of place and the fixity of its directions, e.g., up and down. It also underpins the distinction between natural and violent acts of physical bodies, as when a stone falls naturally downward, or flies violently upwards when it is thrown.13 Scotus explains that when a body shifts from one place to another, the two places are always of the same size and shape, and place thus remains incorruptible insofar as a body always occupies the same dimensions. Place, as the container, remains the same not in actuality, but only mathematically according to its dimensions. The absolute character of place is thus separated from its natural character, which is contingent. Up and down are therefore only products of the contingent and relative actuality of bodies and not properties of absolute place. Place is “incorruptible by equivalence (secundum aequivalentiam), but is not incorruptible accidentally (per accidens).”14 Whereas the Aristotelian conception of place holds directionality to be an essential property of place, Scotus severs place from its directionality and thus distinguishes between place taken in itself, and place as taken according to the contingent actuality of the objects. By laying directionality aside, Scotus is able to distinguish between the thing as it could be in any possible world, and the thing as it exists in this or that specific physical setting. Accordingly, he is able to determine when things act naturally, as when things fall down, and when they act violently, as when an external force acts against natural inclination, e.g., a stone is thrown upward. It is important to note that this distinction does not imply that Scotus holds that bodies do not have places, but rather that their specific places are by nature contingent. As a result, the immobility and incorruptibility of place is no longer tied to the

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containing cosmos, for according to Scotus, place is immobile and incorruptible only dimensionally. However, when place is taken according to its actuality, then it comes to exist every time a body is occupying it and ceases to exist when it is no longer occupied.15 Bodies, according to Scotus’s view, are thus considered according to the aspects which apply to them absolutely, i.e., their dimensionality, as well as that which applies to them contingently, i.e., their specific places and relations to other bodies, including motion, from which up and down are derived. Moreover, being at motion or rest is no longer considered an internal property of thing, but one of its relative features. For this reason, Scotus explains that there is no contradiction in saying that a thing is both moving and at rest, for these terms only express relations.16 Scotus’s conception of place, a conception no longer conditioned absolutely by the outer spheres,17 allows him to claim for the first time that a body can be considered without having a place, i.e., as not being contained by other bodies: Nevertheless, the opposite seems to be true according to the Catholics, for God could make a stone, not to exist in any other locating body, nor existing separately from every other body, because he could make it outside of the universe [and thus not contained by the outer spheres]; and in both ways it would be 'not in place', and yet it would be the same regarded absolutely in itself.18

But how is matter located in a place? In Reportatio IV-A Scotus makes the following claim: “[M]atter is not in a place dimensionally but [rather] it is quantity which is the reason why something exists dimensionally in a place; therefore the reason why that which is generated exists dimensionally where that which is corrupted was previously, is not matter but quantity.”19 Scotus holds that matter has two kinds of “where.” One is definite and belongs to matter by virtue of its own proper essence “insofar as it is a certain substance,” whereas the second type, the dimensional, “belongs to matter by virtue of quantity, which is founded in matter and through which [matter] receives dimensional extension.” Scotus then explains that it is the first, definite kind of “where,” which makes it possible for matter to “receive its dimensional ‘where’ when a new quantity arrives, because matter founds quantity.” Thus, on the one hand, matter has its own definite “where,” while on the other hand there it has a “dimensional” where, which is the explicated where of matter actualized by receiving quantity or form. The reception of quantity might mislead us into thinking that something is added to matter. Cross explains that Scotus introduces the notions of condensation and rarefaction which are types of quantitative change that corresponds to a change of extension without involving a change in the amount of substance. Thus it is not a change in density which results in the change of extension but rather a change in extension that explains the change in density.20

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This, according to Cross, approaches closely to the post-Newtonian concept of mass.21 In fact, adds Cross, Scotus was not the first to employ such a conception and was probably influenced by Giles of Rome’s conception of quantitas materiae22 which was used to explain “what remains constant over the processes of condensation and rarefaction.” Giles and Scotus, he continues, have similar views, though for Giles mass belongs to the category of quantity,23 while for Scotus it belongs to the category of substance.24 According to this view, substance, i.e., the matter out of which things are composed, possess a potential for extension, like a balloon that grows and shrinks while undergoing no substantial change. Cross summarizes: “the mass of a substance is essential to it, such that a change in mass will result in a change in the identity of a substance.”25 Departing from this conception of substantive mass, we can now see how matter can receive quantity so that the reception does not modify the substance: “Therefore, matter, [remaining] in the same definitive ‘where,’ receives a new form and quantity, through which it acquires a new dimensional ‘where’—nor could matter naturally arise elsewhere dimensionally unless it existed elsewhere definitely.”26 The capacity to receive form and quantity while remaining substantially the same explains how matter grounds the possibility of assuming place dimensionally while maintaining identity through all generation and corruption. The discussion of place applies not only to material beings but also to immaterial ones, and is of importance in the attempt to understand how the mind locates itself. This discussion sheds interesting light on our attempt to understand how information entities come into existence, operate, and communicate. Unlike modern man who continuously struggles to bridge between the mental and physical realms, the scholastics did not see an unbridgeable gap. This does not mean that they neglected the problem. Rather they treated the immateriality of the mental as not utterly different in kind from the material realm.27 A sign of this is evident in the enormous effort, especially after the epoch ending condemnation of 1277,28 to explain how angels and other immaterial thinking beings occupy place. This debate, which became a common source of ridicule many centuries later, holds great importance for those of us who are still battling to understand how to bridge between res cogitans and res extensa. Scotus’s discussion of place is motivated by theological considerations, particularly the need to explain how angels, immaterial intelligent beings, can occupy place. As angels are immaterial creatures, the different manner in which they occupy place is grounded in their immateriality. To this end, Scotus needs to show: 1. That immaterial things can occupy place. 2. That immaterial angels, as thinking beings, meet the conditions of occupying a place immaterially. As computers can be seen as immaterial intelligent beings insofar as they are not restricted to a specific body, answers to these issues are

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relevant to them as well. Scotus deals with the first issue by distinguishing the absolute and the accidental elements of place and particularly by addressing that which grounds the accidental occupancy of this or that place: “Then, through nothing absolute in another, it must necessarily be in a place, but [this is] only necessity according to passive potency, by which it could be in a place; and by positing place in an actual existence, and positing its presence in relation to any locating of a body.”29 That which grounds the actual taking place is a passive potency that can assume a specific place by becoming an actual thing. As mentioned, matter is a passive potency. This means that matter is that element of material things which grounds their occupying a specific place. However, it also means that it is not matter as such which grounds the taking of place, but rather matter insofar as it is a passive being. Therefore, any passive being, whether material or not, “preserves the integrity of physics as a science by serving as a principle of location for all body.” And this is exactly the principle Scotus needs in order to explain how angels, who are immaterial beings, can occupy place.30 The second issue remains, however, that is, how angels meet the conditions of occupying a place immaterially. Without dwelling much on this point, Scotus raises the following seemingly absurdity: since the placement of the angels is a result of their act of thinking, it consequently follows that more than one angel can occupy the same place—a conclusion that contradicts Aristotle who “has proved the impossibility of two bodies being in the same place at the same time.”31 Scotus offers no direct indication how such a thing might be possible, but states laconically that: “[T]his is neither incongruous nor impossible, for there is no apparent contradiction involved. For oneness of place is not formally unity of body. Indeed, the body has its own intrinsic unity to which unity of place is incidental.”32 It was shown that it is not matter as such which grounds the taking of place of material things, but rather matter insofar as it is a passive potency. This means that the act of assuming place is not necessarily material as passive potency are not by definition material. It was argued that matter is a passive potency lacking the third and fourth moments of thinking, i.e., relating and reflecting. Thus it is only active in regard to its material essence and requires external actualization, either through causal effects (from natural agents) or through creation (God). The four-fold act of thinking can be transformed into a thinking-locating act through the distinction between the two kinds of relations within the act of remembering. To reiterate, the act of remembering, which is a thinking act, contains two kinds of relations within it: a mutual relation toward its primary object of remembering, the self, and a non-mutual relation to the objects remembered. While matter, by “thinking” its own essence, establishes the mutual relation, it is incapable of establishing the non-mutual relation that grounds the possibility of the thinking subject acting

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freely toward its secondary objects, and thus matter is determined solely externally by causal effects, i.e., involuntarily. So while the “essential” place is determined internally by the material being, its actual place is determined accidentally through external locating relations. Mental beings, in addition to the mutual relation whereby they think their own essence, are capable of relating and reflecting and thus can locate themselves in a non-mutual relation. Thus one can conclude that the subject’s act of thinking “follows” and “surrounds” the mental lodging of all objects of thought (whether within or without the mind) and is that which locates them as contained objects. This also explains why Scotus finds no contradiction in the fact that many angels, and one might add computers, can be located at the same point simultaneously, since this location is determined only in a secondary manner, just as when many minds think simultaneously of the same thing. So, whereas the act of placement by thought occupies place in a shareable manner, so that a place can be occupied by many mental acts, the act of placement by matter is jealous of its place and does not allow other material things to exist co-extensively with it. Scotus’s claim that many angels can occupy the same place, since it implies no contradiction, also grounds the possibility of asserting that physical and mental place can exist co-extensively with regard to the same thing, though not in the same way. As was seen above, Scotus’s distinction between absolute place and accidental (actual) place corresponds to the dual conceptions of ens ratum, i.e., to res insofar as its formal content contains no internal repugnancy, and res insofar as the thing is caused and really in existence. Res in the first sense is considered absolutely and independently of any particular existing thing, so the intellectual act of self-placement is not dependent upon particular and contingent places, but can occupy different places according to the objects of thought it wills. In the second sense, res as is taken according to its actuality, is determined contingently and is known a posteriori. In this respect, material acts of placement are grounded on the actual existence of a being which is contingent and is known and placed only in a posteriori manner. When one considers a thing in one’s mind, whether it is grasped immediately or recalled, the act of thinking contains the grasped or recalled thing. It is clear, however, that the thing grasped is considered absolutely and apart from its reality. This does not mean that the mind does not consider its object as this thing, since the imagination does present a thing individuated sufficiently to consider it as an individual thing, distinguishable from other things. The thing is nevertheless considered apart from reality insofar as the physical environment acting on the specific thing is suspended; it takes a place secundum quid.

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Man is a material being composed of matter, material substantial form, and soul. Just as real things are conceived through the material changes that act on the human senses, so too the man is capable of acting by causing effects through his body. In distinction to man, the angels are immaterial and not limited by material bodies. Whereas material bodies necessarily occupy place, angels stand in no necessary relation to place (though there is no contradiction entailed by their occupying place). As such, angels are not confined to a specific body and can actualize themselves in different places simultaneously. The similarity to information entities is intriguing. Like angels, they are not necessarily confined to a specific body. They require a passive entity to host their operation and can assume numerous passive entities simultaneously. Just like the angels, the manner of their presence and operation is immaterial, meaning intelligible, and is based on their ability to communicate thoughts and information. The rift between the absolute and contingent properties of space is also reflected in the relationship between the soul and the world. As one is situated by the body that contains it, it follows that: 1. the body pro statu isto “situates” the soul, and 2. since the limit of the series of containing and contained body is the cosmos, it follows that the soul pro statu isto requires a cosmos to think and to be situated in the world.33 As we have seen above, Scotus disconnects the essential or absolute consideration of the body as ubi and the external and contingent consideration that is determined by the relation between the containing and contained body. Following the same endless series between the containing and contained bodies, that ends with the cosmos as its limit, it follows that the separation between the essential and contingent consideration of place yields a separation between things’ essential place and the cosmos. Thus, it follows that while Aquinas’s view holds, as a consequence, that the soul requires a cosmos, the Scotistic disconnect between ubi and the accidental place is equivalent to a rift between the soul and the cosmos. The primacy of the cosmos and one’s body are undermined and can be replaced by another cosmos and another body, physical or virtual. Both serve the soul’s contingent extension in the world (real or virtual), and can in principle be replaced. Distinguishing between the absolute and intelligible features of place, and the specific and contingent features, stands in sharp contrast to Aquinas’s view that links thinking with the unity of body and soul. The absolute and incorruptible elements that traditionally constitute the basis for intelligibility are mathematically transformed and disconnected from the eternal and constant movement of the cosmos. Instead, eternity and intelligibility are anchored in the absolute-mathematical that are independent from their actual realization in the world, this or any other.

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The separation between the absolute and contingent realms emphasizes that the realization of the world, its creation, is based on a sui generis principle that is utterly different than that which grounds the absolute realm. Whereas the latter answers solely to the principle of non-contradiction, the former is ultimately directed toward a fundamental why. This fundamental why is essentially different than the why a triangle has three sides. As such the principle that grounds the realization of this world along with its specific physical arrangement cannot be derived from any absolute-mathematical elements that apply to any possible world but rather are synthesized contingently into a specific world and as such become quasi-transcendental conditions to its beings.

Technology, taken broadly, mediates Man to the world, allowing him to overcome his limitations through manipulations. Information technology radically alters how Man operates, communicates, and reorganizes our position and dominion in regard to other entities. It facilitates and simplifies day-to-day operations, but more importantly, it significantly affects our non-physical placements and dynamics. Scotus’s treatment of the notion of place expands what it means to be positioned, physically and non-physically. By distinguishing between the absolute and non-absolute aspects of space, the physical is perceived as one among many contingent types of containment that characterize the way an entity is positioned and functions. More importantly, the notion of space transcends the physical realm and is understood as an essential attribute of being and its activity among other beings, physical or mental. Man and his condition are reflected in the multitude of spaces and their dynamics within which Man operates and is affected. Beyond grammar and vocabulary, language is an edge technology that is interposed between man’s thought and the world. From the operative perspective, language communicates information, commands and synchronizes operations between a multitude of agents, allowing one to execute and order one’s will in time and place by linking operations to one another. To be effective, the orders must be as unequivocal as possible to achieve well-defined results. Such usage of language aims to reduce the agents’ internal space, objectifying their operational clarity. Machine language is an operational language that utterly nullifies ambiguity and demands no interpretation. However, this is a reduction of language. Man’s language is essentially open and non-conclusive. As an edge technology, language presupposes that the

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speakers have different inner spaces and that they do not understand it in an identical way. Through language, understood as a positioning technology, the speakers pose themselves in relation to their objects of thought and to others as non-transparent incommunicable subjects. Information technology’s inherent advantage in providing immediate and precise responses to our needs, far exceeding human capacities, creates a downward spiral of dependency. It propels us to become more transparent and compatible with the system’s needs. In so doing we subjugate ourselves to its positioning, to its interpretation and the way it connects us to others. We are pushed to let go of other means by which we approach information and people. We give up on a variety of sources through which we form our opinions and review the credibility of our sources. As a result, we nullify our own faculties, and turn into information vessels. We willingly surrender as we are nourished by the benefits offered by information technology and actively turn a blind eye to its cost. The opaqueness of the algorithms and our lack of ability to validate the veracity of the information, is of minimal importance in comparison to the ease of access to and the efficiency of the given information and connections. Thus, we willingly eat from the fruit of the tree of “knowledge,” allowing it to determine for us what is true and just, and in so doing, necessitating our act and role in the world. Truth becomes a means to subject our inner selves to operational needs that place us as objects in the world. The following will turn to the question of truth, attempting to locate a grounding by which the subject can reestablish its own space.

Chapter 4‌‌‌

Truth and Existence

Creation is based on the will that brings into existence a desired possible world. The previous discussion on Scotus’s notion of place exemplified how deeply contingency affects the metaphysical structure.1 Scotus distinguished between the absolute mathematical character of place that is invariant in any possible world, and the natural aspects, that apply specifically to this created world, which are contingent through and through. In so doing, it becomes clear that if creating is contingent, then both contingent and invariant aspects govern it. Just as the notion of place has absolute and contingent aspects, so it follows that there are invariant truths that are true regardless of which world is brought into being, i.e., that are necessarily true for all possible worlds, and there are truths that become true only in specific worlds that are brought into being. Our attention will be focused on the role of the will in the manifestation of truths in creating this or that world. This will allow us not only to observe the way such truths apply to the world, but more importantly, the manner in which the will perfects rationality itself. Scotus’s “doctrine of truth” is a concealed doctrine. Naturally, the concept of truth is frequently employed by Scotus; he even devotes a whole question in the sixth book of his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics to it. This, however, is an early discussion and lacks the hallmark of his mature doctrines, i.e., the unique feature which makes the notion of truth in question a genuine Scotistic notion. The question of whether there is a genuinely Scotistic doctrine of truth at all becomes a serious research question when one notices the major role played by truth in the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas, as well as that of Henry of Ghent, for whom the concept of truth in fact served as one of the keystones. It is generally accepted among Scotus scholars that although Scotus was Henry’s greatest critic, his own thought draws upon Henry’s notions, dialectic methods, and conceptual structures. These are adopted and remain intact throughout Scotus’s criticism of Henry.2 Thus the question arises, if Scotus’s thought is so deeply rooted in Henry’s thought and concepts, why is it that Scotus’s system seems to be indifferent to the 45

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question of truth? The key to our puzzle lies in a particular straight-forward consequence of Scotus’s mature thought. Scotus is famous for claiming that the intellect is rational in a diminished or qualified sense, while the will alone is fully rational.3 This claim, in a nutshell, holds within it the key to a new understanding of the concept of truth, for it divides between diminished truth, which is said of the intellect, and truth in a complete sense, which is said of the will. It is the aim of this chapter to show that Scotus’s doctrine of truth is composed of these two types of truth, and to present their full meaning alongside an exposition of Scotus’s understanding of how the will perfects rationality. This distinction between imperfect rationality at the level of the intellect, and perfect rationality at the level of the will, provides us with an important metaphysical toolkit to assess what is demanded of artificial intelligence to be considered truly intelligent. Before proceeding to discuss Scotus, let examine first Anselm and Aquinas’s conception of truth as rectitude and adequation of thing and intellect, as well as the later adaptation of this notion by Scotus. Thomas Aquinas’s discussion of truth in De Veritate is a good place to introduce the discussion as he catalogues the different conceptions of truth held by his predecessors while championing truth as adequation. In De Veritate 1.1, Aquinas distinguishes between three notions of truth:4 1. The first focuses on the ontological character of truth. Its representatives are Augustine, who said “The true is that which is”; Avicenna who said that, “[t]he truth of each thing is a property of the act of being which has been established for it”; and Philip the Chancellor who said that “The true is the undividedness of the act of existence from that which is.” 2. The second view holds that truth is the conformity or adequation between what one thinks a thing is and what a thing is. As representatives of this type of truth, Aquinas quotes Isaac Israeli whom he supposes to have said that “truth is the conformity of thing and intellect,” and Anselm who said that “truth is a rectitude perceptible only by the mind.” (3) The last notion of truth, which is of less important to the current discussion, follows Hilary of Poitiers who says that “the true is that which declares or manifests being” and Augustine who writes that “truth is that whereby that which is shown.” Aquinas explains that while the second conception of truth captures truth in the full sense, the first conception captures truth only analogically. To explain this, Aquinas exemplifies and distinguishes the uses of analogy using the example of “health.” Health is said properly only of that in which health resides, e.g., in an animal. But we can also speak of medicine as healthy—as something which causes health. For this reason, we cannot properly attribute health to medicine, but refer to medicine as healthy only analogically.5 Truth therefore is spoken properly only when we speak of truth as the conformity of thing and intellect, and it is spoken analogically—as that which causes truth—of things as they are in themselves.

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In his commentary on Lombard’s Sentences,6 Aquinas employs the notion of truth as conformity or adequation to explain how reality and the human mind are adequated to the divine mind: 1.  Truth, in its full sense of truth as adequation, is “assigned to the intellect insofar as the intellect’s grasp of a thing corresponds to that thing as it is in itself.”7 2.  The truth of the thing is truth in an imperfect and analogical way, since it is a truth only insofar as it has the potency to produce truth in the intellect. Truth in this second sense is therefore also a condition for the possibility of the primary sense of truth. 3.  God, as the creator of things according to the divine exemplars, is the first measure of things and thus is the most perfect conception of truth.8 Truth is not the measurement itself but rather the adequation of the measure to the measured. The adequation of thing and intellect is the manner through which God’s mind and the human mind are adequated. Truth thus carries a transitive property: while things are measured by the divine mind, the human mind is in turn measured by things. Wippel notes that truth as adequation can be applied both to the truth of things and the truth of the intellect, for “things may be regarded as true both in relation to the divine intellect and in relation to a human intellect.”9 In the order of nature, the definition of truth as adequation applies to the relation between the thing and the divine intellect; it is only afterward that we can speak of an adequation of the human intellect to the thing. A natural thing is called true according to its adequation, either to the divine intellect or to the human intellect. It is called true if “it fulfills the end to which it was ordained by the divine intellect.” A consequence of this account of adequation is that things “cannot exist except by reason of the divine intellect which keeps bringing them into being.”10 In adequation with the human intellect, a thing is called true if it “causes a true estimate about itself.” Scotus’s early writings unfortunately offer no significant contribution to the history of the notion of truth.11 However, as Marrone notes, they do show that Scotus was familiar with current conceptions of truth, such as Aquinas’s “adequation of object to intellect,” Grosseteste’s “conformity of exemplar to exemplified,” Anselm’s “mental rectitude,”12 as well as the notion that there are two types of measures: the absolute measure, according to which things are what they are (God) and accidental measure, whereby things serve as the measure for created minds.13 Before we proceed, we need first to examine the notion of a thing (res). According to Avicenna, Thing (res) and Being (ens) are notions impressed

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immediately upon the soul by a first impression (prima impressio) rather than being acquired from other and better known notions.14 Avicenna presents two accounts of these first impressions: 1.  Analogy: Just as there are first principles which are known through themselves and ground our ability to assent to propositions, so there are first principles that are conceived per se and ground all conceptions: “If every conception requires a prior conception, then this state of affairs would lead either to an infinite regress or to circularity.”15 2.  Communissima: “What is most suited to be conceived through itself is that which is common to all things, as are [the concepts] ‘thing,’ ‘being’ and ‘one.’” These concepts transcend the Aristotelian categories, they are transcendentia and are predicated of all of them. They come prior to everything that is cognized—they are the first conceptions of the intellect.16 Aertsen explains that at first blush, the introduction of the notion of “thing” does not seem to introduce anything new: “The Avicennian —‘thing’ is related to the certitudo of a thing, it signifies its ‘whatness,’ which expresses the intelligibility of the thing as what it is. What is new then, is not the introduction of an intelligible element of things, but rather the conceptual relationship between that which signifies the whatness of things, res, and that which signifies the existence of things, ens. Res addresses that aspect of things according to which they possess a “stable nature” (certitudo) which makes them be what they are, so that there is within a triangle or whiteness that by which it is a triangle or whiteness. This certitude of the thing is the “proper being” (esse proprium) of everything and its “whatness” (quidditas).17 Res grounds an object’s stability and acts as the ground for the certainty of its cognizer. This, according to Avicenna, is to be contrasted with the “affirmed being” (esse affirmativum) or existence of something, which is signified by the term ens. In Sentences II, d.37, Bonaventure discusses the ontological status of sin. Augustine’s statement that “the works of the devil, which are called vices, are acts but not things (res),” seems to entail a contradiction, because vices are acts and an act denotes a difference of being or a thing. And so it seems to follow that Bonaventure affirms that vices are differences of being, while denying that they are things or beings—which is impossible.18 Bonaventure explains that res can be said in three ways: commonly, properly and more properly. Commonly res is derived from reor/reris, i.e., res of thought “I/ you reason” and addresses everything that falls under cognition. Properly, res is derived from ratus/rata/ratum—as ratified or valid res. In this sense, a

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thing is said to be not only in regard to the mind but also in reality, in itself or in another (as accident), and is convertible with ens. More properly, res is derived from ratus/rata/ratum, and is said of ratified things which are in reality through themselves and not through another, i.e., only of substantive beings. Whereas for Avicenna, res is the primary transcendental which expresses the quiddity or certitude of something, for Aquinas, ens enjoys primacy since it expresses that by which a thing is in act. Being can only be understood as being, not from its reality, but from its actuality, from its act of being, which is also the ground of the intelligibility of a thing. Ens is “the first intelligible . . . because everything is knowable insofar as it is in act.”19 Following Avicenna’s two accounts of res, “thing” is understood as a singular either outside the soul or in the soul, insofar as it is apprehended by the intellect. Thing as reor/reris is related to what is in the soul, while thing in the sense of ratus is related to what is outside the soul.20 Addressing the same problem as Bonaventure regarding the reality of sin, Aquinas extends this distinction between the two modes of res: 1. the primary ontological meaning of res simpliciter as determinate and stable being (esse ratum et firmum) in nature which has a quiddity or essence. 2. res as knowable through its essence, and thus signifying everything that is apt to enter into knowledge or into the intellect. This latter mode derived from reor/reris signifies things which may not have stable being in nature, such as negations and privations.21 While Bonaventure and Thomas emphasize the cognizable mode of res when they try to explain the reality of sin as a privation of being, Henry of Ghent’s point of departure is res in its most general mode: “The ratio of thing derived from reor/reris is the first in every created being.”22 Henry’s discussion in Summa 34.2 of cognizable things frees itself entirely from the issue of evil and sin. It occurs rather in the conceptual context of fictitious being, a notion which does not include a privation of being and is ontologically indeterminate. Ens, according to Henry, is what has a quidditative being (esse quidditativum) that belongs to it as a product of its relation to the form of the divine exemplar; it is what is determined by the quiddity, the certitudo of Avicenna. Ens is a res according to ratitudo, because “quidditative being” and “fixed being” are convertible. So while Aquinas identified ens according to the act of being, Henry’s ontology begins not from things’ actuality, but on the contrary from their essential reality. Ens is a ratio for Henry, and as such it is the first or original concept in the intellect as an object. Res in the sense of reor/reris is the thing’s quid intelligible which is grounded on verum, truth, according to the relation between res as a quidditative being and the divine exemplar, which makes truth perceptible to the mind. The character of being cannot be predicated of things if it is not considered first according to its most general sense, i.e., according to the ratio of thing in the

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sense of reor/reris—which is the ground of the relational foundation of being: “Something cannot have the character of being unless it first has the ratio of thing in the sense of reor/reris, in which the ratio of that being is founded (foundatur).”23 As we have seen in chapter 2, Henry distinguishes between the being of essence and the being of existence. The being of essence is “a disposition of a thing in itself by which it is what it is and nothing other than itself, related indifferently to anything else to be attributed to it.”24 The being of existence is an actual being that already possesses an essence and is further distinguished into two kinds: (1) diminished being within the mind, e.g., concepts, and (2) being which exists outside the mind. Scotus maintains that Henry’s distinction between existential and essential beings expresses the latter’s misunderstanding of the duality of reality implied by ens ratum as ratified/valid being.25 To recall, the first sense, regards an abstract thing such as man is not of himself “a valid being but from its efficient cause” and thus “there is never a valid being save an existent one,” and so a being is ratified only insofar as it is caused and really in existence. When ens ratum is considered according to the second sense, the only thing determining whether something is ens ratum, is whether its formal content contains an internal repugnancy or not. The first sense of ens ratum refers to a being’s reality and is a product of causation or creation. The second sense of ens ratum refers to the whatness of a being, which is not caused or created by an external agent, but rather conditioned by the being itself insofar as it contains no internal contradiction. Henry’s conception of res is rooted in the manner by which the intelligible participates in the divine intellect, for “man is not of himself a true or valid being [ens ratum],” but only “insofar as he participates in the first thing as exemplar . . . so far as having an eternal relation to God as knower and exemplar.”26 When Scotus examines the difference between a thing and the foundation by which the thing is, he offers the opinion that every caused thing has “that whereby something is” and “what something is.” After advancing an argument based on the notion of participation, Scotus claims that just as created things possess their being only through a participation in God’s esse, so too, as a first principle of intelligibility, participation in the divine exemplar is required.27 Against this relational position, Scotus argues that ratified being cannot be a product of a relation, because if it were founded by relation, then it would be founded upon that by which it is related. But that to which it is related itself needs to be ratified in order to serve as the foundation of the relation. If ratification occurs through a relation, the series will continue to infinity. Thus Scotus concludes that ratification must be internal and not through any external relation.28

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The same rationale can be found in Scotus’s treatment of the notion of vestige, which typically served as an account of the manner in which humans carry a footprint of the Divine Trinity within them. Vestige designates a similitude which is deficient or imperfect, yet leads to actual, though partial, knowledge of that of which it is a likeness. Scotus here follows Bonaventure’s claim, according to which creatures are said to contain a vestige in respect to the ideas of the one, the true and the good. One since it is “distinct from any other, looks back to God as its efficient cause.” True, since “it has a true ‘being,’ looks back to Him as [its] exemplar cause”; and good insofar as “it has a good ‘being,’ it looks back to the same as [its] final cause.”29 Scotus rejects Bonaventure’s view that the vestige is composed of a threefold causal relation. Just as he rejects a real relational participation in truth, he explains that all relations between creatures and God are non-mutual, and that the vestiges belong to a third absolute non-mutual relation30 which is “a relation of knowledge to the knowable . . . as measured to the measure.” He concludes that the vestige is an “absolute . . . in which that [non-mutual] relation is founded” which “shows in [itself] a certain unity, and form, and order.”31 This long discussion can be summarized as follows: 1. The argument for real participation in truth, according to Scotus, is false. Rectitude is primarily grounded internally in an absolute non-mutual relation that is contained virtually in things insofar as they are things. 2. Contrary to Henry, who postulates two types of res, of existence and of essence, Scotus identifies them as two aspects of ens ratum itself, and thus maintains that the truth of things can be addressed both according to the aspect of the whatness and according to their existing-there. Rectitude is used both in regard to the whatness of things and in an existential-teleological manner. The following will argue that these two rectitudes can be understood as truth of the intellect and truth of the will. One needs to distinguish between whether something is necessary or contingent, and whether something acts contingently or necessarily. In this respect it should be noted that necessity can also be spoken in a qualified sense that applies to the contingent order, for necessity can be distinguished between: 1. When something is logically necessary in all possible worlds. 2. When something is necessary in a specific world or circumstances.32 Scotus also distinguishes between two modes according to which an agent can act or be acted by something else, either according to nature or according to will. He explains: For a power or potency is related to the object in regard to which it acts only by means of some operation it elicits in one way or another. But there is only a twofold generic way an operation proper to a potency can be elicited. For either [1] the potency of itself is determined to act, so that so far as itself is concerned, it cannot fail to act when not impeded from without; or [2] it is not of itself so

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determined, but can perform either this act or its opposite, or can either act or not act at all. A potency of the first sort is commonly called “nature,” whereas one of the second sort is called “will.”33

The division between agents which act according to nature and those acting according to will is not equivalent to the distinction between those who act necessarily and those who act contingently, because natural chains of events can be contingent, not only for us but also for God, due to impediments in the chain of causation resulting from the intervention of other natural agents.34 What constitutes a natural act is that “when the agent and patient meet in the way appropriate to the potency in question, the one must act and the other be acted upon.”35 A natural agent, although capable of producing opposite contingent effects, acts necessarily when a thing is in a position to receive its action. While natural contingent action must act with necessity when a proximate reception relation is constituted with the thing acted upon, free action can elicit opposite effects without necessity whenever there is no impediment between the agent and that which it acts upon. Thus, when proximity is established, natural action constitutes a correlative non-dependent relation, whereas free action constitutes a disjunctive dependent relation. Scotus not only wishes to demonstrate that the will is a rational power, but by relying on Aristotle, he also equates the distinction between natural and free acts to that of non-rational and rational powers, respectively.36 For while natural-contingent-acts are dependent on impediments, and so determined by an external cause, a free agent “has of itself the ability to elicit contrary actions as regards the same thing.”37 Thus, whereas the will is a rational power absolutely, for it wills or nills between opposites, the intellect, as a natural agent, is a rational power only in a qualified way since it cannot but be “determined of itself in regard to what it directs”:38 [T]o have opposites in its power is something a rational potency possesses primarily and per se as a proper attribute of it qua rational. For this is what distinguishes it from an irrational potency.39

Unlike the will, that essentially has the ability to distinguish and choose between opposites, the intellect acts naturally and “cannot fail to act when not impeded from without.” As such the intellect is not a rational power properly. However, it might be considered rational in two qualified senses. Firstly, because it acts under the will’s direction,40 secondly, as a precondition for willing, since the will wills only with respect to the range of possibilities presented by the intellect.41 This might seem as though the will is both prior and posterior to the intellect, as it both directs the intellect, and, at the same time, is dependent on the intellect presenting it with a range of possibilities.

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This conundrum is resolved easily when one remembers that, for Scotus, the memory, intellect, and will are not really distinct but rather manifest different modes of action of the same thing: “Memory, or the intellect functioning as memory.”42 Scotus’s dual conception of ens ratum, which is taken according to its formal content as “ex se ens ratum,” as well as insofar as it “has of itself firm and true being, whether of essence or existence,”43 corresponds to two levels of truth. The first is the truth of things insofar as they are intelligible, i.e., insofar as their terms contain no internal contradiction; the second level of truth obtains when things have of themselves “firm and true being.” But what does this mean? If we were to adhere to Henry’s line of argument, one could maintain that just as there are two types of being, that of essence and that of existence, there should be two types of truth corresponding to them. Such a view, it is clear, would be rejected by Scotus. Scotus’s view of the hierarchy of rationality conceives the rationality and truth of the intellect to be of lesser perfection than that of the will, which makes it clear that the distinction between the truths is formal, just like the distinction between intellect which acts according to necessity, and the will which acts freely. But, then again, what does “truth of the will” mean? The common medieval doctrine of voluntarism holds that when one chooses one thing, it is open for him to choose otherwise. Tobias Hoffmann explains that Scotus asks an additional question: [W]here does the structure of my willing come from? . . . what causes the order in my wanting? . . . One might say that in this case the order came from the consideration of an option that was judged . . . . But Scotus allows for a different possibility: the order or structure of my willing need never have been considered by the intellect at all, even as a dis­carded option. My will itself can structure its own willing [of one good to another].44

Generally, medieval thinkers hold that the intellect does not stand in any real relation to its objects, but only a relation of reason. Relations of reasons are not part of reality, rather they are constructed by the intellect as a result of the consideration of things in opposition to others.45 Hoffmann explains that this dual conception of willing suggests that relations of reason can be subdivided into two groups: (1) relations of reasons which are intellect-dependent, i.e., which are established according to intellective comparisons, and (2) relations which are will-dependent, i.e., which are ordered according to the will’s volitions. Hoffmann’s position finds support in certain passages of Scotus.46 However it also seems that Scotus came to realize that though the relation of the will to its objects is not a real relation, it is also not a strict relation of reason: “[this] relation is not real, as it is not out of the nature of the object

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in itself . . . nor is it a relation of reason, because the power causing the comparison is not reason—whether intellect or imagination is said to be such a comparing power, or anything else.”47 What kind of relation is it then and what purpose does it serve? Hoffmann explains that by practical deliberation, which is carried out by the intellect and prior to any act of the will, things are ordered in the mind according to the desired good, for otherwise the will acts blindly.48 It seems Hoffmann is very aware that it is unclear what additional purpose the will serves in this theory and thus concludes: “Nonetheless, one remains free to will either in conformity with one’s deliberation or not. When one wills contrary to a practical judgment, then the order of the goods correlated by the will does not match the order of those correlated by the intellect.”49 This conclusion, however, holds little power to convince us that that act of the will grounds rationality in the fullest sense, for it is not clear what additional rationality comes through the will which cannot just as well come from the intellect. Hoffman makes a more cogent point when he explains that when God decides what to create, “[t]he decision about which creatures should exist is not derived from a practical dictate by the divine intellect, but rather is freely determined by the divine will itself.”50 This vague should exist can be taken in two senses: 1. ”Should exist” insofar as it serves other desirable things. 2. That the idea should be put into existence, not just insofar as it is in this place as opposed to that place, but insofar as it should exist as placed or positioned at all. Whereas the first sense of ”should” addresses existence as that which serves a whatness and purpose, the second brings to the fore the plain fact that all existence, be it what it may, needs to be placed (and receive other related properties). Placement is [1] common to things which exist within a world, and [2], conditions existing-things in a manner which is not derived from their whatness. Let us now recall Scotus’s conception of place and its implication on thing’s existence. The discussion regarding the truth of the will ended up dealing with the place of material things. As we have seen in the previous chapter, Scotus distinguished between essential “mathematical” place, and contingent physical place along with the forces which govern their movement. Existential place is not rooted in matter per se but rather “belongs to matter by virtue of quantity, which is founded in matter and through which [matter] receives dimensional extension.” But how is all this related to the will? One might reasonably conclude that the distinction between the truth which belongs to the essence of things and the existential truth which belongs, for example, to place, suggests no dependency of truth on the will. The will might be involved in preferring that the stone move upward than downward, or placing the stone somewhat to the left or to the right, but these are all possibilities that are presented to the will by the intellect. The will does not really contribute anything to them but

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existence. To understand Scotus’s point, we need to show that there is something about existential place that contains an element of rationality which is not rooted in the intellect, but in another kind of rationality. Let us examine Kant’s famous treatment of the triangle which corresponds beautifully to Scotus’s structure: Give a philosopher the concept of a triangle, and let him try to find out in his way how the sum of its angles might be related to a right angle. He has nothing but the concept of a figure enclosed by three straight lines . . . [and] may reflect on this concept as long as he wants, yet he will never produce anything new. He can analyze and make distinct the concept of straight line, or of an angle, or of the number three, but he will not come upon any other properties that do not already lie in these concepts. But now let the geometer take up this question. He begins at once to construct a triangle. . . . [and] through a chain of inferences that is always guided by intuition, he arrives at a fully illuminating and at the same time general solution of the question.51

To translate this insight back into Scotus’s terminology, we could say that the essence of a triangle has nothing to say about whether or not a triangle contains 180°.52 Kant teaches us that the fact that triangles consist of angles whose sum is 180° is true a priori, but not analytically. That is, it is not a truth embedded within the concept of the triangle, but is rather a truth which is grounded in the nature of space, which could be otherwise. Moreover, modern mathematics has constructed various possible geometries and holds that in non-Euclidian geometries, a triangle has, in a synthetic a posteriori manner, more or less than 180°.53 This means that just as the proposition “a triangle has 180°” is true only on the basis and assumption of a specific geometry, so there are numerous mathematical truths that are true synthetically a priori due to their actual existence.54 Thus it follows that the Euclidean or non-Euclidean nature of the world is not derived in an intellectual manner but is rather tied to existence which is not just a matter of predication, to exist or not to exist, but rather refers to a manner of existence which applies to existing things in a synthetic a priori manner. What characterizes synthetic a priori truth is that although it is evident, its truthfulness is not contained within it analytically, but can be known only through something which does not belong to it.55 In other words, since the intellect cannot ground synthetic a priori truth in itself, it follows that such truth is determined or grounded in something other than intellect. As was seen above, the intellect is characterized as a rationality which knows according to necessity. If the 180° contained by all triangles is not grounded by the intellect alone, it follows that the rationality which demonstrates the 180° of the triangle is not a rationality according to necessity like the rationality of the intellect. This does not mean that the

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properties of the triangle are known through something irrational, for nothing can force the concept of a triangle to contain a contradiction and still remain conceivable.56 On the contrary, the plain fact that the concept of triangle is in itself indifferent to existence, and therefore to whether it will be actualized according to Euclidian or non-Euclidian geometry, makes it possible for it to be actualized freely according to different actualized geometries, none of which is inherently preferred by the intellect.57 From all this, it follows that synthetic a priori truths do not fall under the type of rationality of the intellect, i.e., of necessity, but rather under a rationality which is determined in a non-necessitated manner. The truths that fall under this type of rationality will be called truths of the will, whether the willing agent can be located or not. Kant is famous for his so-called refutation of the ontological argument.58 In it, he argues that being is not “a real predicate . . . that could be added to a concept of a thing,” but “merely the positing of a thing. . . . In the logical use it is merely the copula of a judgment.” When considered from a logical point of view, Kant is absolutely right that predicating being of a thing adds nothing to the concept of that thing. However, when Kant states that “the actual con­tains nothing more than the merely possible,” he seems to fall into a fallacy. His explanation is that if the actual hundred dollar bill were to add something to the possible hundred dollars, it would then be the case that the concept of a hundred dollars “would not express the entire object and thus would not be the suitable concept of it.” Against this position held by Kant, we have shown that the distinction between conceptual truths of the intellect and existential truths of the will is exactly what enables the claim that the concept of a triangle applies to both Euclidian and non-Euclidian geometries. It follows that the existence of a triangle (or an actual hundred dollars) necessarily “contains more” than the merely possible concepts of them, for example that a triangle has 180°, or that $100 can buy can buy more or less (properties which are of course contingent). What is important is that something which is taken according to its actuality, necessarily adds contingent a priori truths to its concept).59 Kant might object to all this by saying that he is not speaking of actual or extramental existence60 but only of the phenomena that are indeed real, but in the secondary sense of appearing in experience, which is rooted in an intuition of space and time that “only points to a being (‘something existing’).”61 To this counter-suggestion that the notion of a phenomenal realm deprives the predicate “existence” of meaning, it is possible to answer as follows. Leaving aside the question of the ontological status of the actual hundred dollars—whether they have extramental or mental being—the hundred dollars must stand in some relation to something actual (the world, the subject, etc.). Thus it follows that regardless of whether a thing is taken to exist extra-mentally or only as a phenomenon, existential truths are contracted in

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a synthetic a priori manner to their essential truths,62 such as containing 180° or other properties, truths without which it would be impossible to refer to anything as an actual phenomenon or extramental thing.63 The generally accepted account of Scotus’s theory of cognition is that it distinguishes two types of cognition: 1. Abstractive cognitions, by which a thing is understood through an abstraction from existence; 2. Intuitive cognitions, by which the intellect cognizes “a thing so far as it is present in its own existence.”64 The first to cast doubt on whether humans are capable of experiencing intellectual intuitive cognition in this lifetime or in the next was Scotus himself.65 To allay this doubt, Scotus immediately writes that “it seems that there is” such an experience of intuitive cognition in this life.66 However, his following argumentation, which is based upon the Franciscan maxim that the perfection of the inferior faculty of sense must reside in the superior faculty of intellect, does not appear very convincing.67 A stronger argument appears in the second book of the Quaestiones super libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis, though it does not speak of intuitive cognition explicitly (yet leaves little room for doubt). Here Scotus expresses, in a striking Kantian phrasing, what he probably thought about the manner intuitive cognition is present to the wayfarer: “If, however, one held that the intellect could be known intuitively here, one could say that every distinct act of the sense is accompanied by an act of the intellect about the same object; and this intellection is vision.”68 Scotus’s intuitive cognition is however a rather meager type of intuitive cognition. In Wolter’s words: “we have no intuitive intellection of material substances as such” nor any “separate or purely spiritual substances,” and all knowledge we hold of such things is attained by description.69 Though for centuries many have been drawn to Scotus’s conception of intuitive cognition, a fundamental question lingers: what is it that we conceive as being in a thing “insofar as it is present in its own existence”? The distinction we have suggested between conceptual truths of the intellect and existential truths of the will, makes it plausible to claim that it is not the naked existence as such that is cognized in intuition but rather the existential truths that accompany it, for as Kant famously argues, there is nothing to distinguish between existence-in-itself and the concept of existence. It is precisely because existence grounds synthetic a priori truths, which are not determined according to natural necessity, that existence is cognized.70 For if existence were not to produce contingent synthetic a priori knowledge, beyond and external to the internal necessity of the intellect, things could not be presented as independent from the intellect.71 In Ordinatio III, d. 14, q. 3, Scotus investigates the manner in which Christ understands (as opposed to the angels and man), and argues for the need to

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attain knowledge intuitively. His reflection there supports the view we are advancing here. What is interesting about his treatment is that Christ, as the Son of God, is more perfect than the angels, who according to some theologians (e.g. Aquinas) understand through innate species, while on the other hand, Christ, due to his human rather than angelic nature, possesses an “active intellect.” The main problem Scotus highlights here, and which can be understood in part as a major criticism of Aquinas’s theory of angelic intellection, is that intelligible species, whether abstracted or infused, are likenesses which do not represent things in their existence, and cannot be used in order to derive any contingent knowledge of things.72 And so in order to handle such “contingent truths knowable by intuitive cognition (which are contingent truths about existents insofar as they are existing), it is necessary to have the objects themselves present to the subject so that they can be intuitively known and understood in themselves.”73 Scotus concludes that innate species cannot suffice in order to know reality and therefore an intuitive knowledge must be responsible for contingent knowledge of reality. Disputing or qualifying Scotus’s opinion that humans have no intuitive cognition of things due to our fallen state, we argue rather that by tying intuitive cognition to the possibility of contingent knowledge, together with an identification of synthetic a priori truths with the contingent truths of the will, it comes about that knowing reality in its contingencies is not based upon knowing this or that thing to be this or that, but rather upon intuitive cognition of the contingent synthetic a priori truths that accompany things’ existence, and which brings us to a certain knowledge of things, which is nevertheless transcendentally contingent, such as the truth that a triangle has 180° (or whatever geometry applies to this world, Riemannian for example). One might object that the overall conclusions of this presentation stand in contradiction to Scotus’s explicit statement that truth is not the proper object of our intellect, but being. Scotus answers this objection himself by explaining that the “truth which is in stone does not include stone essentially or virtually; but, just the reverse, the being which is in stone includes truth, and so it is for any other beings and their truths.” The truths of existence perceived through intuitive cognition are but attributes of existing being.74

Much of the contemporary discussion of information technology and the revolution it has engendered is limited by being interpreted and confined to the terminology and goals of the computational field. Previous technological revolutions brought about the means to overcome specific limitations that

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define the human condition and expand man’s capacities. The agricultural revolution, for example, freed man from the precarious dependency on hunting and gathering food. By equipping man with the knowledge for producing food consistently, a stable ground was established that made advanced society possible. Similarly, the industrial revolution outsourced the production function, liberating man from being the primary production machine. Despite the affinity between the information revolution and the computation revolution, the latter resembles the industrial revolution insofar as computers first replaced and advanced man as a computation machine. Whereas the computer revolution is concerned with advancing our capacity to compute and manipulate information, the information revolution goes beyond, first to the world itself, but ultimately to the world as such. Whereas previous revolution liberated man from a specific labor or limitation, the information revolution offers to liberate us from this specific reality as a whole. The concerns and discomfort brought about by fake news, alternative truths, deep fakes, etc. presuppose that the real essentially grounds truth itself. This is a misunderstanding of the essence of the information age: information technology’s ultimate objective is to liberate us from the real world and its truths. This reveals the fact that the goal of technology is not simply to assist man in attaining his desires, but more profoundly, to overcome his existential conditions, his creaturehoodness. If overcoming creaturehoodness and its embedded limitations is that which moves man’s desire, then man’s ultimate desire, to which technology is directed, is to become God. But at what cost? We are already witnessing this cost in the dis-configuring world that is losing its grasp of truth, of the distinction between good and evil, is devoid of purpose and faith, and ultimately, is losing hold of the real. Some might say that this is a good description of hell. The expansion of information technology, which, at the outset, seemed to impose objectification and clarification, has been turned upside-down. Information technology presents the mind with a recreated world, selectively dimming, enhancing and manipulating different facets of reality, facilitating alternative dynamics along with the corresponding quasi-transcendental truths that govern it. These truths apply within specific systems that synchronize the will of the participant and the system’s objectives. The religious wars of the seventeenth century between Catholics and Protestants, ripped Europe apart. It ripped it apart not only on the battlefield of the Thirty Years’ War, but in its soul. For centuries faith provided assurance, grounding, truth. The religious schism between the Catholics and the Protestants shook the very pillars of faith. If each accused the other of adhering to wrong beliefs, of believing in idols, or that salvation could be found only within the church, then both become suspected of being false. Who decides who is right and who is wrong? Is there a criterion that will

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reestablish order in the world? Some scholars say that this collapse of the religious underpinnings is what drove philosophers like Descartes, who lived most of his life during this horrendous war (and even participated in it), to search for a criterion that could provide the grounds for truth. Descartes found such a criterion in the irrefutable certainty of mathematics, around which he built his new philosophy. This basis was later translated into the core ideal of the enlightenment project. Information technology blurs the distinction between the real and the non-real, what is true and what is untrue. Following post-modernistic deconstructionism and relativism, the notion of truth and objectivity was dismantled to serve political groups and agendas. While information technology is based on well-defined and unambiguous machine language that facilitates computers’ algorithms and communication, their products have undermined our notions of reality and truth and surrounded us with like-minded persons. Information technology cripples our ability to reach a common ground around which society can build itself. Like four hundred years ago, it is of the utmost importance to identify a criterion that will offer us the common ground to conceive reality and truth that can meet the challenges of the age of information. Information technology undermines our trust in reality, repeatedly exemplifying the nullification of truth. One might hope that this will lead to the opposite result, to a Hegelian affirmation that will transcend information technology’s attempt to liberate us from reality and truth. The ever-expanding gap between information and reality ultimately negates itself and reveals that information itself is meaningless without reality. In attempting to affirm the reality of reality, information must be transcended and sublated.75 Whereas behind Facebook (now Meta) and Google (now Alphabet) one can find algorithms, Mark Zuckerberg, etc., nothing lies behind reality and the truths that accompany it. They are simply there, fundamentally contingent yet without reason. In the words of Silesius, reality is simply “without why.”76 The fact that things are, under whatever philosophical constellation, is a springboard for any questioning and cannot be forgotten or suspended. It is that which assembles all thinking and without which all thinking becomes futile.

Chapter 5‌‌‌

Time and Eternity

Augustine’s perplexity about the notion of place is overshadowed by his puzzlement about the question of time: “What then is time? If no one asks me, I know; if I want to explain it to a questioner, I do not know.”1,2 Kant taught us that time and space are the intuitions by which objects are constituted and find their place. When emptying his thought of all its objects, Augustine discovered that he was not left with nothingness but with the “quality of space.” Similarly, we can say that we are also left with a “quality of time,” as a result of which we find it difficult not to ask what happened before creation. As was exemplified in the discussion of the truths of the will, being placed is not just a positional placement but accentuates, most of all, the manner of placement, which is grounded in the will, and so is reduced to the question of creation. The focus of the chapter is the key tension between eternity and temporality. Developing a new conception of the truth of the will allows us to present a conception of time that mitigates the seeming contradiction between freedom of the human will and divine foreknowledge of future contingents.3 Before proceeding it is important to introduce McTaggart’s famous distinction between A and B type of time from 1908, which is fundamental to the philosophical treatment of time since its publication. A-type is what is known as dynamic or tensed time. According to this view, the now of becoming is real and truly determines future events. Consequently, future events have no real ontological status or determination other than as future possibilities. McTaggart summarizes: “the distinctions of past, present and future are essential to time, and that, if the distinctions are never true of reality, then no reality is in time.”4 In contrast to this stands the static or tenseless view of time, or what is called B-type. This view holds that past, present and future are of the same ontological status but are related differently as prior or subsequent.5 Thus it follows that the future is not generated out from the present but is only related to it as prior is to later. Though some scholars hold that Aquinas held A-theory of time, e.g., Harm Goris,6 most studies hold that Aquinas presents a B-theory of time. Since I 61

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have confronted Goris’s brave position elsewhere,7 Aquinas’s account will be presented briefly as a B-type without delving into the subtleties that might suggest that it is an A-type. Aquinas’s account of divine foreknowledge and his conception of time aim to collocate the following three points: 1.  That God possesses knowledge of future events. 2.  That although God foreknows future events, they are indeed contingent. 3.  That our conception of the future as opened can be reconciled with God’s foreknowledge of future events. God, according to Aquinas, knows everything through his essence: “God knows completely the power and perfection of His essence, His knowledge extends not only to the things that are but also to the things that are not.”8 With regard to the first two points, Aquinas puts forward two arguments. The first holds that for God all events exist simultaneously, however ordered according to before and after, like up and down: [S]ince the vision of divine knowledge is measured by eternity, which is all simultaneous and yet includes the whole of time without being absent from any part of it, it follows that God sees whatever happens in time, not as future, but as present. For what is seen by God is, indeed, future to some other thing which it follows in time; to the divine vision, however, which is not inside time but outside time, it is not future but present. Therefore, we see what is future as future because it is future with respect to our seeing, since our seeing is itself measured by time; but to the divine vision, which is outside time, there is no future.9

In this passage Aquinas not only aims to explain the sense according to which past, present, and future events are present to the divine mind, but also our experience of time. According to this, the distinction we make between past, present, and future is not a real distinction but rather a product of the manner in which we perceive events, that are present to God simultaneously: “we see what is future as future because it is future with respect to our seeing, since our seeing is itself measured by time; but to the divine vision, which is outside time, there is no future.” The presentness of the past and future is not a virtual presentness, nor carried through divine ideas, but a real one, for God knows them “not only as they are in their causes but also as each of them is in actual existence in itself.”10 In order to explain the contradiction between human beings’ and God’s cognition of temporal events, he gives as an example the relation between a point on the circumference of a circle and the center of the circle. While every point of the circumference of the circle does “not co-exist simultaneously with any other point . . . the center of the circle, which is no part

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of the circumference, is directly opposed to any given determinate point on the circumference. Hence, whatever is found in any part of time coexists with what is eternal as being present to it, although with respect to some other time it be past or future.”11 The second claim explains how the contingent, despite being contingent, can be known for certain. This is based upon the fact that “in so far as the contingent is present, in that time, it cannot not-be” and thus “nothing is lost to the certitude of sense when someone sees a man running, even though this judgment is contingent.”12 The two moves, put together, result in Aquinas’s view according to which all events are determined but contingent: for God all events exist simultaneously and relations of before and after are conceived by us as past, present and future. As a result all events are determined. However, this does not yield the fact that they are not contingent, for God could have chosen a different set of events; however, when a contingent set of event was chosen, it is conceived as certain by the divine mind. Scotus’s conception of time can be found in many excellent studies.13 His metaphysical treatment of time follows primarily distinctions 38–39 of Lombard’s commentary on the first book of the Sentences.14 Scotus first presents and refutes various opinions of others. Let us inspect some key objections. Following Henry of Ghent, Scotus argues against the view that holds that God knows future contingents through divine ideas. He explains that the divine ideas exist in the divine intellect, according to necessity, prior to the act of the will. Thus it follows that if future contingents are grounded upon divine ideas then they cannot be contingent for the divine ideas are determined by necessity. Hence, since they are contingent, they must be grounded within a contingent faculty.15 Contrary to the view of Aquinas according to which God knows future contingents because he can see past-present-future, like the center of the circle that is juxtaposed to all points on the circumference, he argues that God would not be “co-existing with any place (in any ‘now’) unless existing . . . for the same reason eternity will not be the reason for co-existing with anything except with what is existent: and this what is argued, that ‘that which does not exist, cannot coexist with anything,’ because ‘to co-exist’ speaks of a real relation, but a relation is not real where the foundation is not real.”16 Craig remarks on this matter that if future knowledge were to hold some ontological status, then it follows that God will produce an event twice, e.g., sitting down, both as a future event and as a present event.17 Scotus holds that the example of the circle can be used to support his view. He explains that a circle holds a real relation between the center, which is immobile, and another point on the circumference which is not standing but is rather “a flowing circumference, whose circumference is nothing but an instant in act.”18 Other than that actual point there are no other actual existing points on the circumference but potential points which do not exist: “the

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circle of time is not a fixed and already constituted figure, it is not given as a whole, totum simul, but is thought ‘according to the imagination of the geometrician.’”19 If the circumference as a whole were to exist together then it would be simultaneous to eternity, but the nature of any of these points is that they are fleeting and thus each of them is present to the eternal center only for an instant. It follows that Scotus agrees with Aquinas that the “now” of eternity as it co-exists, does not equal the temporal “now” . . . because the “now” of eternity is formally infinite, and so exceeds formally the “now” of time; however not by co-existing with other “now” [i.e., with a now other than that which is present].20

Like Aquinas, Scotus maintains that the relation between the Now of eternity and the fleeting now is analogous to the relation between the center of the circle and its circumference whereby the first is eternal insofar as it is immobile, and the latter is present for an instant (these N/nows should not be understood as simple points but rather as points on a continuum which is bounded by instants21). Unlike Aquinas, Scotus maintains that the difference between their natures does not imply that the whole of time is given to God (or the center) simultaneously in an instant. It seems that Scotus’s conception of time contradicts his close conception of God’s foreknowledge of future events, since he claims that God has immutable, infallible and determinate knowledge of the future.22 According to what Scotus conceives as the most plausible explanation, “the divine intellect sees the truth of a proposition . . . made and worked by the will,”23 i.e., the divine intellect sees in an a priori manner the determination of his will. Though contingent, this leaves us with a closed future. As others have pointed out,24 this seems to contradict Scotus’s conception of time as well as Scotus’s conception of freedom, the hallmark of Scotistic thought. Some have even claimed, for example, Allan Wolter, that the fact that this treatment is missing from Scotus’s mature Ordinatio suggests that it is possible that he was not satisfied with it.25 Since I consider Scotus’s treatment of time and his conception of freedom as more solid and central to his thought than his early treatment of divine foreknowledge, Scotus’s claim of a definite knowledge of the future will not be accepted and will be qualified to meet the Open reading of Scotus. What is the nature of this relation between eternal and temporal N/nows? Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann distinguish between simultaneity of temporal things, T-simultaneity, eternal things, E-simultaneity,26 and between eternal and temporal things, ET-simultaneity. Stump and Kretzmann define ET-simultaneity as follows: (ET) For every x and for every y, x and y are ET-simultaneous if

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i.  either x is eternal and y is temporal, or vice versa; and ii.  for some observer, A, in the unique eternal reference frame, x and y are both present—i.e., either x is eternally present and y is observed as temporally present, or vice versa; and iii.  for some observer, B, in one of the infinitely many temporal reference frames, x and y are both present—i.e., either x is observed as eternally present and y is temporally present, or vice versa.27 Whereas for Stump and Kretzmann, ET is symmetric according to their definition of simultaneity, i.e., “Simultaneity = existence or occurrence at once,”28 Richard Cross points to a non-symmetric relationship that takes place. Cross explains that the relation between God and creatures is not (1) transitive, i.e., the fact that God co-exists with t1 and t2 does not imply that t1 and t2 co-exist; nor is it (2) symmetrical29, i.e., “while crea­tures are really related to God, He is not really related to them.”30 In other words, whereas the divine eternal Now has a real effect on creatures, the temporal now, although “seen” virtually by God through his essence, does not alter God. Though Cross admits, “[i]t is not clear to me just what ET-simultaneity amounts to,”31 and putting aside the important controversy regarding Stump and Kretzmann’s treatment,32 ET-simultaneity is definitely applicable to the current state. We are left then with the following question: how the divine, which acts from eternity, and the temporal, can be brought together in such a way that the non-divine cannot be reduced to the divine or vice versa. But what does it mean to be brought together? The togetherness of eternal Now and temporal now are senseless if there is nothing which is present there. Thus, instead of speaking of the coexistence of now, we shall look for the co-presentness of the divine and the temporal. But if the temporal and the divine co-now together, and we take this coexistence seriously, it follows that we cannot reduce one to the other, for then it would only be a seeming coexistence which amounts to the typical claim that one of the N/nows, usually taken to be ours, is but an illusion and a product of some imperfection.33 As was seen earlier, Aquinas’s position maintained that the distinction between past-present-future, along with our experience of the flow of time, are but illusions, and that, for God, who sees the whole picture, they are but a present which is grasped together. Thus, before we can answer how the eternal and temporal N/nows can co-exist together we need to show how the divine and the non-divine can be co-present together in a non-reductive manner. Such non-reductive co-presence can be found in the act of the will and specifically in sinning. But why sinning? Why should we not examine the act of willing generally or acting generally regardless of whether it is a natural or

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volitional act? These are important questions that will allow us to understand why sinning is so important for our needs. Before we can address sin as a unique case of volitional act, let us first distinguish between natural and free acts. Scotus explains that what constitutes a natural act is that “when the agent and patient meet in the way appropriate to the potency in question, the one must act and the other be acted upon.”34 While a natural contingent act must act with necessity when a proximate reception relation is constituted with the thing acted upon, a free act can elicit opposites without necessity when there is no impediment between the agent and that which is acted upon. A natural act, because it acts according to necessity, is reductive by its nature to its causes and thus cannot be the grounds for a non-reductive co-presence of the divine and the non-divine, and consequently cannot be the ground to explain how the non-divine can be co-present in a non-reductive manner. And so we come again to our question: why should we refer to sinning and not simply willing, for the will acts not according to necessity but freely and thus is non-reductive by definition? The problem with willing is that willing, taken generally, can be read in a non-natural way which is yet reductive to the divine will, as with Aquinas. As we have seen earlier, Aquinas held that although events are by nature contingent, and that there is no necessary causal relation between the act and its effects, they were pre-ordained by the divine will. In such a case it follows that when we choose, although we choose not according to nature, our will was determined in a non-natural way by the divine will. It follows then that the non-necessitation that characterizes the act of the will, taken simply, cannot of itself be the ground for a non-reductive co-presentness of the divine and the non-divine. What is unique about sinning is that it cannot be reduced to God’s will for God cannot will sinning, or in Scotus words, “Sinning is forbidden willing.”35 A transcendental inquiry of how sinning is possible if God cannot will a sin, is in fact a transcendental examination of how a co-presence of the divine and the non-divine will is possible.36 It was a commonly accepted view that God was part of any causation of created things.37 Scotus examines several solutions to the question “[W]hether the created will is the total and immediate cause of its volition.”38 The first holds that only the creature is responsible for its act of willing and that God’s role is solely to sustain the creature’s will.39 This view preserves the fundamental freedom of the will and, at the same time, exempts God from willing sins. Scotus however had to reject this solution for he couldn’t reconcile it with God’s foreknowledge of contingent events and also because it seems to limit God’s power.40 It is important to note that although Scotus rejects this solution in the Ordinatio, there are two strong indications that that might not be his last word on the matter. The first are the words of his personal secretary

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and closest disciple, William of Alnwick, who said that this was a “view that Scotus considered probable.” The second piece of evidence rests in the fact that in his late Reportatio II41 he maintains that both the “official” solution and the first “rejected” solution can “be sustained.”42 Thus, before we turn to the official solution of the Ordinatio, it is clear that Scotus did not have a final view on the matter and that he was not too happy with the conjunction of his insights and the theological demands that he was forced to maintain. The second solution, which he accepts in the Ordinatio, holds that both God and creatures co-cause the volition of the creatures. Scotus examines two ways by which causes can co-cause essentially, termed by William Frank “participative” and “autonomous.” Participative co-causation is an instrumental co-causation, such as when the hand and the pen join together in the act of writing: “the inferior only exercises its causality by participating in the causality being exercised simultaneously by the superior.”43 In this kind of co-causation the superior cause moves the inferior and thus the inferior cause is only responsible instrumentally for the product, which leaves the superior cause essentially responsible for the effect. Scotus must reject such co-causation for it implies that God, who causes more perfectly, is responsible for sinful acts. Scotus then says that the co-causation between God and creatures in the act of volition is of another kind, the “autonomous” kind. In this co-causation both causes, whether equal in power or not, are independent, and no production can come to be without the participation of the other cause. An example of that is the conception of a child where the father and the mother are its co-causes which are independent of each other.44 As Frank notes, autonomous co-causality is implemented by Scotus throughout the cognitive process: the co-causality between species of intellection and the agent intellect,45 the intellect and the will, the human and the divine agent.46 It is important to note that the co-causation solution does not bring us closer to understanding how God foreknows future contingents but only that such a solution does not necessarily undermine our objective, unlike what seems to result from the first solution. What is the manner in which the divine and creaturely wills co-act together? How the divine now and the temporal now co-act together? The above discussion made use of Scotus’s discussion of sin in order to show how the divine and the creature can co-act together. This concluded with the understanding that such co-action is an “autonomous” co-causation whereby the inferior causer, the creature, must be able to produce an independent effect, for otherwise the superior causer, God, will be responsible for sinful causation. Thus it follows that the created agent must truly be independent to act otherwise. However, a problem remains. In what was described above, a father and a mother were given as an example of co-causation of an offspring. But if we are to be the mother/father, where is the father/mother in the co-causation of

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the act of volition? If God co-wills in every act of our will, why is it that his will is not present for us (other than his supposed footprints within history)? As was explained, co-causation was an accepted stipulation for Scotus and his contemporary scholars, but this only resulted in some clarification of such cocausation and left us empty-handed regarding how such co-causation occurs. The question regarding the co-nowness of the divine and the fleeting N/nows was reduced to the co-actness of the divine and creaturely wills. The hypothetical maneuver of the previous chapter showed that synthetic a priori truths regarding the geometrical truths of space, are truths of the “divine” will which transcendentally ground the objects that are present to the will of the created creature. Consequently, the creature does not will in a vacuum but only in a secondary sense. The willing act of created creatures is a synthetic co-willing which synthesizes together the a priori divine will and the a posteriori will of the created agent. These two acts of will are two N/nows, one from eternity, i.e., as given synthetically a priori, and the other temporal, i.e., as a posteriori, that coincide in the act of willing. Moreover, these two N/nows that coincide are constituted in a relation of before (a priori) and after (a posteriori) that “counts” the movement of the willing into existence, and thus meet the requirements of time, i.e., numbering the “motion in respect of before and after.”47 This time is independent from worldly motion and is grounded in the inner transcendental relation between the eternal a priori willing Now and the temporal a posteriori willing now. This structure not only explains how the divine a priori Now and the creaturely a posteriori now co-cause together but also why the relation between them is asymmetric and intransitive. It is asymmetric, for while the a priori Now conditions the a-posteriori now, the a priori Now remains unmoved by the a posteriori now. It is intransitive, for while the eternal Now is a transcendental condition which is present in any willable object, any a posteriori act of willing is distinguished from any other a posteriori act of willing. As a result, although at any moment a willable object could be willed and unwilled (what Scotus refers to as the divided sense), in actuality it is either willed or unwilled (the composite sense).48 Following the same argument one may claim that since the numbers 2 and 3 hold a relation of before and after, they can also constitute temporality. This however is an abstract time that is used in any typical clock. Against this abstract counting of time, the suggested temporality between the eternal and the passing N/nows counts the co-causation into existence that is made by a priori and a posteriori acts of willing existence. The terminology that is used might resemble that of the B theory of time, however this is not the case, for the relation of before and after considered here is not of events but rather of two willing acts which are simultaneous temporally and at the same time hold a logical relation between the prior and the posterior. Moreover, whether

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events are predetermined or not by the divine will, the a priori and a posteriori now-acts of will relate differently to the past and the future. The a priori Now, because of its synthetic a priori nature, is determined only transcendentally, just like the triangle is only determined transcendentally to have 180 degrees. Thus the synthetic a priori act of willing opens a manifold of possible, distinct and/or opposed willings that co-now together in an approaching nowpossible-manifold (either practical willable objects, e.g., to marry or not to marry Regine, or simple contemplative futural objects). This open manifold that is transcendentally determined is what is can be called the future.49 Thus it can be said that the a priori act of willing is a Now act of futuring which opens a transcendental manifold of possibles from which willable are made into existence. The a posteriori now, which naturally comes afterward, is the act by which the open manifold is determined and the willable is made into past, whether as actualized past or unactualized past. Putting it differently, the co-nowness of the a priori and a posteriori “nows” creates a movement whereby the open manifold of the future is actualized into an a posteriori specific past. This produces a reversed temporal thrust whereby the a priori willing act, which opens the future manifold, is pushed into the past by the a posteriori willing act. Brian Leftow writes “we can ask believers in a flowing now why it flows: what ‘powers’ the passage of time.”50 This chapter tried to offer an answer. Through a transformation of Scotus’s co-nowness of the eternal and the temporal N/nows to the co-causation of the divine and creaturely wills, it was shown that the synthetic a priori truth which governs the geometrical truths of space can be understood as eternal truths of the will which govern the constitution of possible willing objects insofar as they can be willed to exist. Replacing eternal Now and temporal now with synthetic a priori truth and synthetic a posteriori truths explains the sense these two “nows” co-now together, like the specific triangle which co-nows with the eternal contingent truths of geometry, i.e., that it has 180°. Not only that, it shows that such a relation is in fact a relation that meets the definition of time which measures the movement. Thus, geometrical truths are understood to be not only spatial existential truths but also the presence of eternity at each moment, that along with our internal act of willing, constitute a logical-temporal movement. Based upon the above analysis, two positions can be asserted: 1. Although an a posteriori act of will was not proven and in fact was presupposed in order to safeguard God from willing sinning (which is taken as a theological fact regarding our willing existence in the world), we contend that it is more plausible to accept our a posteriori act of willing than to reject it. Since such an act is a posteriori by definition, it is impossible to prove that in an a priori manner. However, since it was shown that the synthetic a priori truths of geometry are truths of the will, and thus that truths of will are facts of reality,

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it is more than plausible to accept that our inner experience of freedom is not a mere illusion (although it might be). Putting it differently, once it is proven that reality is transcendentally constituted in a contingent manner, it is less rational to decline our basic experience of existence which intuits itself as acting freely. 2. The analysis maintains that the “future” is but a projection that is caused in an a priori act of will which opens a manifold of the willable into existence. Thus it follows that the question whether tomorrow, at noon, a sea battle will take place, is a question regarding willable things which are willable in an a priori manner. However, the truth value cannot be determined by the a priori futuring act for it is only determined a posteriori, insofar as it is willed into the past. Therefore it can be claimed that any question regarding the truth value of future contingents, based upon the claim that the truth value of propositions are immutable, is untenable. This is because existential truths presuppose a posteriori determination act, i.e., their pastness. Thus it follows that a truth value regarding existence is indeed unchangeable for existence logically refers to what had being determined in an a posteriori sense.

If free will is an illusion, then all subsequent events are written in advance. No new information could be generated. Like a Leibnizian monad, each moment, each subject, contains all other moments, all other subjects. From an objective point of view, choosing is an act that adds new information in an ontological manner. It determines which possibilities are actuated and which are not. The addition of information from an objective point of view can be understood from two complementary perspectives. The micro perspective focuses on the minimum amount of information that is required to modulate the current state of affairs into the next one, following trajectories from the past to the future. If a choice is completely predictable based on past trajectories, then the choice that actuates the state of affairs adds no information that is not embedded in the state of affairs. If a possibility is more probable, i.e., past trajectories are clearly manifested in the future, less information is added. However, suppose a state of affairs is less probable and is not manifestly implied based on past trajectories. In that case, more information is required to explain the transition to the future state of events. Such a choice adds more significant information to the determination of the system. The macro perspective looks at the whole forest of possible futures. As the information added becomes more meaningful, more possible futures are lopped off, significantly limiting the multiplicity of possible futures. Every act of choosing shapes the future like a stroke made by a sculptor on a block of

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wood. The more informative that is added, the more decisive the stroke for the determination of the figure that emerges from the wood and the elimination of other figures. The more informative a choice is, the more profound its future determination is from an objective point of view.51 If choosing is an act that adds new information that shapes the wood, then the act of creation is that which presents the wood to be sculpted. Creation lays out the world as a subjective potency to be determined informationally. But information can also be understood subjectively. The “I” that each of us perceive, is the product of choosing between alternatives. In the “I,” information is assembled and reflected as meaning. The “I” is an informatic construct that can perceive itself in relation to other things or persons, in space, and perhaps more importantly, in time, in the past, present, and future. This subjective reflection of information affects the objective accumulation of information insofar as it influences our choices. Chapter 8 concentrates on final causality and its relation to efficient causality, attempting to explain how our subjective understanding of the state of affairs influences our choices, and thus affects the elimination of possible futures. Information technology is equipped with the means to substantially influence our choices. This might lead to better control of the unfolding of events, but it poses a serious price for our autonomy, not just to our ability to act freely in the world, but perhaps more fundamentally, to our ability to assemble subjective meaning, through which the self is constructed. The dialectic between the participant and the a priori truths of the system, despite a level of freedom, also indicates the degree of restriction imposed by the system and its governors. Keeping a system “free” means its subjects can add substantial information. A system whose subjects are inclined to choose in a manner that does not add new information, is a system that treats us as predictable and lacking in free will. Maintaining freedom does not only protect the inhabitants of the systems, but it also allows for the genuine creation of new information and developments. Facebook, Google, and their likes are today the lords of the estates within which we reside. Their laws determine our ability to move and act, and we find ourselves without genuine freedom to choose other systems. The following chapter will examine whether a bare minimum of restriction applies to such an all-governing lord, who functions like the all-knowing, all-powerful God. It will be argued that when a logic of power dictates their attitude to the inhabitants of their systems, they have good incentives to preserve the inhabitants’ freedom.

Chapter 6‌‌‌‌‌‌

Let There Be Freedom

Duns Scotus perceives that the ultimate raison d’être of the incarnation lies in God himself, and consequently, creation serves God’s desires.1 This presents a frightening picture of a God who acts as he pleases. Such a God, who created the world for his own reasons, seems to have no obligation toward creation itself and its creatures. Paraphrasing Kant, if God created the world for his own needs and desires, one cannot but deduce that his principal relation toward it, and its creatures, in his order of thinking, is nothing but as a means to an end. Besides this utilitarian cause for existence, there seems to be no ground rule that defines and regulates creatures’ position in the world. Dostoyevsky depicts this God in The Brothers Karamazov: “There is no law for God, for whatever stand God takes is right. Wherever I stand thereby becomes the most important spot . . . So everything is permitted and that’s all there is to it!”2 Such a God and his justice are not much different from our post-modern sentiment that conclude that justice is nothing but a result of cold and ruthless calculations of interests, or worse, by inconsistent whims of virtual communities that follow sophistic representations. Appalled by such a possibility, some interpreters found refuge in Scotus’s words that “whatever God made, you may be sure he made it in accordance with right reason,”3 whereas others rejected any attempt to subjugate God to any kind of objectified necessitation: “right actions are right simply because God has freely and contin­gently commanded them, and wrong actions are wrong simply because God has freely and contingently forbidden them.”4 The question arises: if we cannot introduce any objectified truth or good to limit power, perhaps it is possible to find something within the essence of power that might restrict it? The previous chapter resulted in what some call an Open conception of Divine Foreknowledge, i.e., that the future is not definitely determined and that man is endowed with genuine freedom. Following this, we will examine the relationship between power, divine foreknowledge and freedom, arguing that not only that human freedom does not limit the divine power, it in fact enhances it. 73

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What genuinely lies behind this chapter is the very real challenge we are facing, individually and as society as a whole. In an era where knowledge is power, Google, Facebook, and their like, that unceasingly increase their information, might become as close as it gets to a godlike entity upon this earth. Thus, the hypothetical question about God is aimed at the technological challenge that lies in front of us: will the rising technological lords subjugate us completely, or can we expect them to respect our freedom, at least to a degree? Theodicial thought considers God to be absolutely perfect in every respect. In line with the Augustinian-Anselmian intellectual heritage, God is considered to be all-powerful, all-knowing, absolutely free and good in the most perfect sense. Needless to say, this generates an array of problems and tensions. For example, can an absolutely free and all-powerful God truly execute his power and freedom if he is bound to be good, i.e., not to act in a reprehensible manner, or does it imply that, if God is the most perfect artisan, who planned his creation in the most detailed manner, Man is deprived of choosing freely? These problems and others are truly ancient and resulted in much ridicule of the theology of the perfect being, most famous of which is Voltaire’s Candide. Typically, the crux of the problem is an outcome of the fact that perfect being theology attributes to God all the pure perfections in the most perfect way. Pure perfections are “whatever it is in every respect better to be than not to be,”5 e.g., it is always better to have goodness than not to have goodness, it is always better to have the capacity to think than not to be capable of thinking, and, in contrast, it is not always better to be taller rather than shorter. Without further elaborating on this vicious problem, it can be summed up thus: By demanding that the Supreme Being be perfect in all positive respects, one is forced to assert that God is nothing like us and so to hold that he is indeed good, all-knowing, all-powerful, and so forth in the most perfect sense, and that these tensions are somehow resolved. One way to resolve the problem is to say that we need to accept the fact that God is simply not supremely perfect in every respect so he may indeed be supremely good but limited in his potency, or absolutely free but not as good as we thought him to be, etc. Yet another way is to sacrifice, for example, Man’s freedom, in order to defend God’s perfect attributes, in this case his freedom and omnipotence. All options leave theology crippled: 1. When no concessions are made, such that God is claimed to be perfect in every respect, we are left with either the question of how an incomprehensible perfect God’s goodness, freedom, and power can be held together without jeopardizing our freedom, or with a theology that rejects an essential feature (perhaps the essential feature) that characterizes man. 2. When some concessions are made, we are left with an imperfect God, and the need to prioritize and sacrifice one divine attribute to protect the perfection of the other. 3. This results



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in questionable moral responsibility. Another possibility, that circumvents these impasses, is to accept that the deity is omniscient and omnipotent, but to qualify what is meant by omniscience and omnipotence. As I see it, an open conception of God that qualifies the use of the notions of omniscience and omnipotence, offers both a viable solution to the seeming contradiction between God’s perfect attributes and human freedom, and a solution to whether God acts arbitrarily according to his right reason. John Sanders, a prominent proponent of the open view, explains that “[i] f God foreordains all things, then God is not a risk taker. If God does not control every detail that occurs, then God takes risks.”6 Sanders lists five risk models of providence; here I will mention only the last three that are relevant to this study.7 1. The knowledge-of-all-possibilities model contends that God knows in advance “all possible actions that creatures with libertarian freedom may take” and consequently can foresee his responses in advance. 2. Molina’s middle knowledge model holds that since God understands perfectly what “makes us tick,” he can arrange the world in a manner that permits us to choose freely and yet still adhere to God’s plan.8 3. Presentism contends that there is no knowledge about the future, and consequently “it cannot be an imperfection not to know what is not in itself knowable—that is,, the future, the not yet real, at least in its free or not yet determined aspects.”9 Though Duns Scotus’s conception of time seems to support the presentism risk model, I will argue that taken together with his doctrine of the Primacy of Christ, the knowledge-of-all-possibilities risk model is a better fit with the general Scotistic structure. Through applying this model to Scotus’s thought, a solution to the problem of arbitrary use of power will be offered. As we recall, Scotus maintains that the relation between the Now of eternity and the fleeting now is analogous to the relation between the center of the circle and its circumference whereby the first is eternal insofar as it is immobile, and the latter is present for an instant. It was argued that foreknowledge of the future is impossible since “that which does not exist, cannot coexist with anything.”10 Thus, it was concluded, existential knowledge cannot be attained in an a priori manner. This, it seems, supports the presentism risk model.11 Whereas essential truths are true in regard to all possible worlds and are known in an a priori manner, truths of existence are true in an a posteriori manner to a specific contingent world and a specific setting. These truths fall under the category of the will insofar as their determination as true is contingent and could have being otherwise. Since the distinction between past-present-future refers to the order of existence, it follows that the truthfulness of whether something will exist or not must fall under the final determination of the will. This contingent knowledge can now be differentiated into (1) contingent and determined and (2) contingent and undetermined. Aquinas

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argues for the first alternative, teaching that God contingently determined all events that ground divine foreknowledge. But such foreknowledge is obviously attained by sacrificing humans’ genuine freedom. In my qualified interpretation of Scotus, I support the second alternative according to which existence is determined only in an a posteriori manner, and consequently an a priori knowledge of the future is simply impossible.12 I hold that Molina’s middle knowledge view,13 according to which God can see, with certainty, creatures’ free decisions, contradicts the very essence of Scotus’s conception of freedom that holds that free action, by definition, can elicit opposite effects without necessity.14 I will call Aquinas’s all-future-knowing capacity Omniscient. Although such divine foreknowledge is impossible, as presentism argues, I claim that God does hold allknowing power in terms of what is knowable, and, that, I will call omniscient. In contrast to Aquinas, it can be said that if God’s power and thinking capacities are the most perfect, it follows that although the future is by definition unknowable, which makes him not Omniscient, he can have perfect knowledge of all possible future outcomes. God is omniscient in a qualified sense insofar as he has disjunctive divine knowledge of all possible futures. Thus, as opposed to the impossible sense of Omniscient, we can speak of God as allknowing insofar as he knows essential knowledge, actual knowledge of what actually came about, and disjunctive contingent knowledge of all possible sets of events. Like Richard Creel and Peter Geach I hold that God’s disjunctive knowledge of all possible sets of events, that he considered in advance, prevents any essential risk-taking on God’s part, for God can navigate the world in any direction in which he preordained it regardless of man’s choices. This does not limit Man’s freedom, it simply means that Man’s choices do not have power over God’s goals.15 There is thus nothing in Man’s freedom that limits God’s freedom, unless God only allows the world to be exactly what he wants it to be. But then there would be no reason to endow Man with freedom. The Jewish tradition summarizes this outcome in a famous phrase: “All is foreseen, and freedom of choice is granted.”16 This reading puts much more emphasis on the divine will and the creatures’ wills. The fact that God’s knowledge of the future is only disjunctive turns him into an active agent who constantly steers the future to wherever he destined it. This seems to contradict the words of Scotus who explains in his discussion regarding the Primacy of Christ that: I say that the incarnation of Christ was not foreseen as something occasioned [by sin], but that it was foreseen by God from all eternity and immediately as a good more proximate to the end . . . . Hence this is the order followed in God’s prevision. First, God understood himself as the highest good. In the second instant he understood all creatures. In the third [instant] he predestined some to



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glory and grace, and concerning some he had a negative act by not predestining. In the fourth [instant] he foresaw that all these would fall in Adam. In the fifth [instant] he preordained and foresaw the remedy—how they would be redeemed through the Passion of his Son, so that, like all the elect, Christ in the flesh was foreseen and predestined to grace and glory before Christ’s Passion was foreseen as a medicine against the fall, just as a physician wills the health of a man before he wills the medicine to cure him.17

This paragraph seems to support a position that is known as consequent necessity which contradicts my reading. Feinberg explains consequent necessity as follows: [O]nce certain choices are made (by God or whomever) certain things follow as a consequence. But before these choices are made, no inherent necessity dictates what must be chosen. For example, it was not absolutely necessary that Adam sin in the sense that there was no other Adam God could have created. Consequently, it was not absolutely necessary that God decide to send Christ as redeemer. However, once having made the choice to create Adam as sinning, it was necessary for God to send Christ as redeemer.18

Though Scotus's words seem to support Feinberg’s view, I hold that the same paragraph can be read in a manner that supports the knowledge-of-all-possibilities risk model. This same paragraph can be read not as a prescription of the specific world that God intended to create but rather as the description of a specific set of possibilities which brings together God’s intentions, Man’s choices, and God’s reactions. But this is but a subset of the infinite possible outcomes that were conceived beforehand by God and which happen to characterize our world: 1.  Divine Necessitation: God understands himself as the highest good.19 2.  Logical Limitation: God understands all creatures, i.e., he reflects not just the creatures as ideas in his mind but all the possible sets that do not include logical contradictions. 3.  Divine Limitation: a.  Within this set of possible sets he observes those whom he elects to glory and grace. b.  To the rest, whom he did not elect to glory and grace, God “had a negative act by not predestining.”20 4.  Human Choice: Within that set he discerns the Fall. 5.  God’s Reaction to Human Choice: Within that Fall he discerns that Christ, who was predestined to be incarnated, regardless of which set comes about, will be crucified and so will pay for the sin of Adam. However, we could easily think of a different subset whereby:

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4*. Man did not Fall and consequently 5*. God did not send Christ to be sacrificed on the Cross.   While (3a) holds that God predestined some to be elected to glory and grace, (3b) holds that others were not predestined for glory and grace by a negative act. (3b) seems to supports the open future interpretation since it maintains that God willingly determined the rest of humanity not to be predestined. This reading could reconcile Scotus’s open conception of time with what seems to be a closed conception of the future. As we recall, Scotus explains God’s infallible and determinate knowledge of the future by saying that “the divine intellect sees the truth of a proposition . . . made and worked by the will.”21 Scotus’s subtle distinction between those whom God “predestined . . . to glory and grace” and those on whom “he performed a negative act by not predestining” (et circa aliquos habuit actum negativum, non praedestinando), offers an interpretation of some future events that were willingly determined not to be determined. This qualified reading, I believe, also avoids the problem of immutability.22 However (3b) can also be interpreted to support the contrary view that their predestination takes place at a lower level of God’s plan. Also, it should be noted why (3) comes before (4). Scotus makes it perfectly clear that in the order of intension, according to which the order of creation is derived, Christ, and afterward the elects, are intended and predestined before all else.23 As a result, God sanctions the subset where Christ is incarnated, afterward he limits the possibilities for those where the elects are to receive glory and grace, and only afterward subdivides in his mind those worlds where man has fallen and those where he has not. In his discussion regarding the primacy of Christ, Scotus explains that Christ’s crucifixion is only perceived as a possible reaction if man were to Fall:24 [T]he Fall was not the cause of Christ’s predestination. In fact, even if no man or angel had fallen, nor any man but Christ were to be created, Christ would still have been predestined this way . . . . If the Fall were the reason for Christ’s predestination, it would follow that the greatest work of God [the Incarnation] was mostly occasioned, because the glory of all is not as great in intensity as was the glory of Christ; and it seems very unreasonable that God would have left so great a work [i.e., the Incarnation] undone on account of a good deed performed by Adam, for example, if he had not sinned.25

From this passage it can be inferred that God did not know that Christ would be sent to the Cross, for he did not know that man would Fall, and all that this signifies. But he could envision such a possibility coming about.



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As such, what at first seemed to be a preordained plan is simply one of the contingencies that God saw but could not know that it would happen. However, once Adam willingly ate the forbidden fruit, God simply executed the predetermined plan in place if such a scenario were to take place, i.e., the crucifixion of Christ. By ordering his priorities God can “foresee” how to work out whatever will happen. By so doing God can, on the one hand, preserve the free nature of creation while at the same time plan, as an active God, steer the world so that the freedom of the creatures and the contingent nature of creation does not jeopardize the purpose of creation. As for God’s knowledge, he is not Omniscient insofar as knowing which outcome will take place, but he is omniscient insofar as he knows all possible outcomes and the measures he needs to take to steer the world toward whatever goals it was predestined to carry out. Insofar as God’s freedom is concerned, he attains whatever goals he intended to attain in his creation. With regard to God’s omnipotence, no event forces him to act against his will for he has foreseen all possible events and through his continuous acts of will, he makes sure that only sanctioned world scenarios are permitted. That is to say that all possibilities that do actually come about are in accordance with God’s will and power. When God sent his beloved son to redeem Man, this did not happen in a manner that forced God to act but rather as part of a contingency plan that he foresaw and sanctioned in advance as a possible action plan. It can be said that the capacity to keep diverse infinite sets of possibilities for whatever God intends only intensifies the meaning of omnipotence. For a lecturer who can only deliver one lecture, and who requires a very specific kind of audience and setting, is much less powerful than a flexible lecturer who can adjust his lecture perfectly to accommodate an audience and setting that has not been predetermined, but nonetheless perfectly gets across the important point he set in advance. And finally, insofar as man’s freedom is concerned, this retains man’s capacity to shape history in an utterly contingent and yet limited manner. Moreover, and as we will see later, such an ever-active will of God has some interesting implications for our understanding of God’s goodness. Using the hierarchical viewpoint, we can see that the freedom that God grants creatures does not limit his omnipotence in any respect, on the contrary, it intensifies it. For while my freedom is limited by your freedom, our freedom not only does not limit God’s freedom, it intensifies his omnipotence. It is at this point that we can start to address the problem of arbitrary use of power. The solution presented above for divine foreknowledge sheds new light on Scotus’s notorious alteration of the distinction between potentia dei absoluta and potentia dei ordinata.26 Whereas, prior to Scotus, the distinction was understood to differentiate between this world as it was actually

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ordained versus the set of possible worlds out of which God picked this one,27 Scotus merged it with a legal distinction between a rightful act according to the ordained settings, and the power to act absolutely, i.e., to transcend the ordained law and to act according to what does not hold a contradiction.28 Let us observe Scotus’s formulation: In every agent acting intelligently and voluntarily that can act in conformity with an upright or just law but does not have to do so of necessity, one can distinguish between its ordained power and its absolute power. The reason is that either it can act in conformity with some right and just law, and then it is acting according to its ordained power . . . or else it can act beyond or against such a law, and in this case its absolute power exceeds its ordained power. And therefore it is not only in God, but in every free agent that can either act in accord with the dictates of a just law or go beyond or against that law, that one distinguishes between absolute and ordained power; therefore, the jurists say that someone can act de facto, that is, according to his absolute power, or de jure, that is, according to his ordained legal power. 29

Prima facie, it seems that Scotus opened the floodgates to the ultimate capricious God who acts as he pleases and changes the rules whenever he likes and for whatever reasons suit him. Moreover, he applied it univocally to both God and Man. It is for this reason that many point the finger at Scotus, holding his new formulation as responsible for the collapse of the synthesis between Christian theology and Graeco-Arab philosophy.30 In the following I will attempt not only to argue that such a distinction is required to support God’s omniscience but also that this distinction is required to maintain Scotus’s claim that rationality itself is perfected only at the level of the will.31 Scotus was very much aware of the seeming capriciousness of the byproduct of his alteration and so he immediately qualified it. He explained that acting in an absolute manner does not mean acting as one pleases but rather in a manner that reinstates a new order and in accordance with one’s power to replace the law with an alternative one. Scotus writes: But when that upright law—according to which an agent must act in order to act ordinately—is not in the power of that agent, then its absolute power cannot exceed its ordained power in regard to any object without it acting disorderly or inordinately. . . . But whenever the law and its rectitude are in the power of the agent, so that the law is right only because it has been established, then the agent can freely order things otherwise than this right law dictates and still can act orderly, because he can establish another right or just law according to which he may act orderly. . . . And therefore such an agent can act otherwise, so that he establishes another upright law.32



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The ability to legislate, postpone, or alter a law is not given absolutely but rather is equivalent to the degree of power one holds in this ordained world. Thus, one who is governed cannot alter the laws that govern him. Similarly, a ruler who has the ordained right to legislate, does not have the right to alter divine laws. God, as the creator of all, has, by definition, the capacity to act absolutely. Man’s capacity to act absolutely does not limit God’s power since his capacity to act absolutely is limited to his power, and Man’s power, by definition, is subjected to God who can act absolutely in a far wider manner. Consequently, whatever men’s absolute power allows them to do, this does not jeopardize God’s ability to attain his goals. Returning to our picture of a creator God who is not Omniscient but only omniscient and who creates a contingent world with creatures who enjoy freedom, the distinction between potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata becomes not only an essential tool to redirect the world toward God’s intended goal but brings this distinction into accord with Scotus’s contention that rationality reaches its perfection only at the level of the will. Whereas the common analysis pictures God as a monarch who reacts and legislates new law in response to whatever happens, and so might or might not be capricious, the omniscient God that was presented above pictures a skillful God who masters freedom to such a degree that it allows him to govern a creation which is free and at the same time does not limit his power or will. Acting absolutely does not represent capriciousness but rather the application of a rational contingency plan. God might not have known in advance that the world would have come to this state, but as supremely rational and all-powerful, he has foreseen it as a possibility and come up with the most rational measure to steer the world to whatever goals he intended for it in advance. I believe this approach puts us in a better position to reconcile the dispute regarding Scotus’s words that “whatever God made, you may be sure he made it in accordance with right reason.”33 Scholars such as Wolter34 and Ingham35 insist that Scotus’s statement makes it clear that God is not a capricious God but that there are basic moral and non-arbitrary features which express the integrative and harmonious coherence of moral acts.36 Other scholars such as Williams reject the objective character of right reason and accuse them of supporting a Thomistic interpretation of Scotus. Williams claims that, for Scotus, “right actions are right simply because God has freely and contin­ gently commanded them, and wrong actions are wrong simply because God has freely and contingently forbidden them.”37 Williams is right in saying that God created the world for himself and his will is its groundless ground. However, when one takes seriously the idea that God created the world for a reason, it is irrational to think that he regulates the world capriciously. It is more reasonable to think of such an omniscient God as one who regulates and interferes in a manner that simply steers the world toward these

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predetermined goals. Right reason simply expresses the appropriate manner of action which is required in specific settings. In the case of an omniscient God, an act in accordance with right reason simply effects, in the most suitable manner, the corrections that are needed to steer the world toward whatever goals God predestined for it. These corrections, though preconsidered in advance, are implemented only in accordance with the specific outcome that results from the fact that Man can choose freely. I believe this fits well with Scotus’s explanation of right reason: The moral goodness of an act consists in its having all that the agent’s right reason declares must pertain to the act or the agent in acting. . . . It is clear then how many conditions right reason sets down, for according to the description given above, to be perfectly good, an act must be faultless on all counts. Hence Dionysius declares: “Good requires that everything about the act be right, whereas evil stems from any single defect.”’ “Everything,” he explains, includes all the circumstances.38

It is interesting to compare this interpretation of right reason with Leibniz’s idea that following the principle of sufficient reason, this world is the best of all possible worlds. Otherwise, God would have chosen a different world that is better. Without elaborating what makes one world better than another, typically depicted by Leibniz mathematically as a sort of maximum between simplicity and reality,39 such a picture reduces freedom to that one moment when God, as it were, chooses the best world. The picture I presented of God as a perpetual co-causer/willer of reality considers freedom in the most radical sense. Nothing is determined at any moment for creatures to continuously and freely co-steer the world. This presents the omniscient God with the need not only to compare all the worlds to one another before creation and to pick just one of them, but rather to consider in an a priori manner every fork at every moment of every possible set in order to conclude what is the best manner to act in any circumstances.40 But whereas Leibniz’s God knew perfectly well that he picked the best world, God does not know whether his local action will necessarily bring about the best result for he only can project what the most plausible outcome will be. For man might afterwards pick an implausible course of action that could put God’s former action (a1) in a less favorable light and to which an alternative action (a2) turns out to be more suitable. But God could not have known that and his action is taken not according to what will happen but rather according to what is the most reasonable to do. In any case, this should not bother us much for the omniscient God has already taken into account such a possibility and the appropriate alteration that is required in such a case.



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In fact, Leibniz’s scheme can be integrated into the presented solution. It can be said that God’s calculation algorithm, that picks the best possible world as a sort of consummate between simplicity and reality, can be supplemented by two other key variables (that are of different types): v1: God’s preordained goals. v2. Whether the creatures are endowed with freedom. Leibniz’s formula, simply taken, presupposes that v1 is empty, having no preordained goals. This of course can be changed; it may have one specific goal, which might be at the beginning, middle, or end; there may be many. The fewer the non-dependent preordained goals are, the more dominant the maximization of simplicity and reality becomes. As the world is imbued with an increasing number of preordained goals, the plain maximization is increasingly qualified and becomes irrelevant if God preordains each and every event. Whereas v1 is an empty/finite/infinite list of events, v2 is a binary variable that determines whether creatures are endowed with freedom. The different inputs dramatically change the behavior of the calculation. The nature of the qualification of the theodicy is thus determined by the combination of the variables. The presented solution also protects us from Euthyphro’s second horn as it is paraphrased for our needs: “does God love and command what is good because it is good, or is it good because God loves and commands it?”41 For while God’s goals of creation remain hidden to our reason, and though the circumstances of each scenario are totally different, the algorithm which right reason uses must be the same, for otherwise right reason would turn into right reasons that would face God with the reverse of a Buridan’s Ass dilemma: he would starve to death not because he did not have a sufficient reason to turn to the left or to the right, but rather because he had too many sufficient reasons that he couldn’t pick the right one. While right reason does not determine its end, it is rational with regard to the algorithm it applies which measures how good the different alternatives are with respect to the plausibility that such a course would bring us closer to the desired goals and other circumstantial reasons. Though numerous numbers of measuring functions can be brought in, for example, in which one gives more points to having red eyes and others to those who have yellow teeth, all must give an accounting to one principle of measuring which is grounded in the essence of quantity. Thus, whether God would prefer in advance a measure that under specific setting prefers yellow teeth, once he created the world, he would have to stick with the same algorithm for all possible sets, for otherwise would we return to the opposite Buridan’s Ass problem. God, acting in an absolute manner, may change the laws; however this does not represent arbitrariness but rather a rational and well-calculated attempt to attain predetermined goals. One may say “but what about the ultimate Good that God desires?” and I would reply: So long as God’s preferences for his goals do not sabotage the possibility of having a stable algorithm which dictates right reason, then let God choose whatever

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he wants. The fact that the change is a product of rational and unchangeable algorithmic calculations, in which the principle of measuring is invariant, pretty much removes the sting and brings comfort and stability as against fear of groundless changes. In the effort to evade Euthyphro’s second horn, I would like to conclude this chapter by confronting several disturbing outcomes that result from Thomas Williams’s powerful analysis of Duns Scotus’s volition theory. In contrast to Wolter’s interpretation, Williams claims42 that God is like an utterly unrestricted legislator who determines right and wrong utterly freely and so the act of the will cannot be rationalized in any external manner. Supporting his claim, he quotes Scotus who said that “there is no cause why the will willed, except that the will is the will, just as there is no cause why heat heats, except that heat is heat. There is no prior cause.”43 Here are three consequences of Williams’s arguments that I will try to tackle: 1.  Whereas as we humans try to adjust and adequate our inner desires externally to the divine will, God’s will has no external measure, it is the measure. For that reason, Williams holds that while humans possess two kinds of will, the affectio commodi (affection for advantage) which represents the primary self-interested desire of the will and the affectio iustitiae (affection for justice) which is “the first regulator of the affectio commodi,”44 it seems that God does not have affectio iustitiae, he simply does as he pleases. According to Williams’s reading “God would turn out to have an affectio commodi, not an affectio iustitiae.”45 Williams illustrates this outcome in the following wonderful example: Suppose I am a rather high-minded, Platonistically-inclined philosopher. My sole allegiance is to philosophy; as I see it, my only obligation is to seek out and make known the truth with all the fervor I can command. So I have no obligations to my students as such. . . . Suppose further that I can carry out this obligation no matter how I treat my students. Strictly speaking, then, I have no duties to my students; I cannot be unjust to them, since I owe them nothing.46

2.  As against Wolter’s position, whose position is supported in Scotus’s words that “Whatever God made, you may be sure he made it in accordance with right reason,”47 Williams quotes another place that supports his claim that right reason is determined solely by God’s will: A free appetite . . . is right . . . in virtue of the fact that it wills what God wills it to will. Hence, those two affectiones, the affectio commodi and the affectio iustitae, are regulated by a superior rule, which is the divine will, and neither of them is the rule for the other. And because the affectio commodi on its own is perhaps immoderate, the other [that is, the affectio



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iustitiae] is bound to moderate it, because it is bound to be under a superior rule, and that rule . . . wills that the affectio commodi be moderated by the other.48

3.  Since right reason is utterly unregulated and determined solely by God, and since the affectio iustitiae is not a cognitive faculty, it follows that man has no rational means to know what is right and what is wrong. Instead, Williams holds that though we do not know what is right and what is wrong, the affectio iustitiae brings us into an “immediate, nondiscursive awareness that certain actions are right or wrong.”49 To the second: I hold that the same passage justifies our reading as well for there is no doubt that God’s will, by setting his objectives first, regulates the manner in which a right reason deduces its decisions. Yet right reason is not regulated solely by God’s primary desires but also by a rational and immutable algorithm which is grounded in an invariant measuring principle. Thus, though right reason ultimately serves arbitrary desires, right reason functions and corresponds to its surroundings in a manner which is not arbitrary at all. To the first: Contrary to Williams’s claim, that God does not have affectio iustitiae, the account presented in this study implies the contrary. As we recall, Williams pictures God as a professor of philosophy who is totally committed to the notion of seeking the truth and has no obligations toward his students. However, it seems that God acts in a manner which is very similar to the way the affectio iustitiae acts in us. For just as the affectio iustitiae is the inclination and awareness that drives us to regulate our will in order to conform to God’s will, the study presented a God who takes our will into consideration. Whereas Aquinas’s or Leibniz’s God does not take our will seriously when he calculates his world, the Scotistic divine knowledge presupposes the most attenuated God who fully respects our wills. This, as we have seen, results in a most accurate kind of right reasoning which takes our will into account in the most respectful manner—by not depriving us of our genuine freedom. To the third: Though I accept Williams’s claim that affectio iustitiae does not grant us any knowledge of God’s will, this does not mean we are utterly in the dark and can attain such knowledge solely through divine revelation. Following the presented solution, the fact that God does not act arbitrarily and accepting that he endowed us with free will, results in a most reasonable and attentive algorithm that reacts and governs the unfolding of history. This, to which unfortunately I cannot add much more, contradicts Williams’s grounds according to which we have no rational avenue to distinguish between right and wrong. Williams could simply reject my claims arguing that my solution presupposes that God is attentive to creatures’ will. My response is that this, of course, cannot be proven, for the specific settings of the solution I used

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have tried to bring into harmony the problem of divine foreknowledge and freedom of the will. As I see it, Williams’s example of the philosophy professor over-amplifies God’s freedom and power at the expense of those of the creatures who are utterly diminished. This might work very well for some, but I think that Scotus, the univocal thinker, would not be happy to adopt a philosophy which treats God’s and creatures’ wills in such different manners. Moreover, I think that my lecturer example shows that the attentive God results in a more powerful God than that of Williams who supposedly amplified God on account of his creatures, and since power is a pure perfection, it is better to follow my solution than another which leaves us with a weaker God. In his article regarding Euthyphro’s dilemma, Norman Kretzmann distinguishes between Theological Objectivism, which supports the first horn, and Theological Subjectivism which supports the second. Kretzmann, who rejects the second horn of the dilemma on moral grounds, raises the difficulty that if we adopt Theological Objectivism, God becomes not the law-giver but rather the law-transmitter. But if that is the case it follows that the answer to the question “What does God have to do with morality?” is “Nothing essential.” Of course, nothing essential need not be nothing at all. The person who first taught you arithmetic certainly has something to do with arithmetic, but nothing essential; there would be arithmetic even if that person had never existed.50

The solution suggested presents an answer to this problem in the following way: the laws are subjective insofar as they are derived from God’s subjective predestination of the world. However they are also objective insofar as they are derived from an immutable rational and attentive algorithm. The laws, though they can be changed, are both subjective and objective and thus evade Kretzmann’s problem for they express both God’s desire and objectified goodness that is derived from the rationality of right reason. Kretzmann’s observation that Theological Objectivism turns God the lawgiver into God the law-transmitter, can be applied when we evaluate Leibniz’s theodicy according to which God creates the best of all possible worlds. It can be said that such a formulation, if taken alone, limits God’s will and turns him into a technocrat and a bureaucratic creator: he is only the executor of creation but becomes essentially indifferent to it. Such an indifferent and bureaucratic consideration turns God from a creation-giver into a creation-transmitter. This bureaucratic approach fundamentally contradicts the understanding of creation as a free intentional and artistic act. Paul Helm writes: There must be a further factor which accounts for the actualization of the world which actually exists . . . [that seems to be] something besides God’s goodness.



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And it is hard to see what that other factor could be than a mere exercise of God’s will.51

This additional factor points to the ultimate factor regarding the question of creation: not what to create but whether to create. The radicality of the act of creation lies in its fundamental lack of necessity. It is solely grounded in God’s will. This, as we have seen in Scotus’s account of the incarnation, is a direct result of the fact that creation is an intentional act and consequently the grounds for it reside outside what is created. This initial desire, whatever it is, is prior to any theodicial considerations, as they are desired only in a secondary manner as having the aim of perfecting the created world.

Technology is our realm of creation. As creators, we have the freedom to decide which laws govern our created world and to populate it with entities of our choice. Theodicial reasoning offers hypothetical tools to think about the relationship between the governing information system and its users. The idea that we might be able to regulate its function through some sort of legislation might work for a while, but, in the long run, other forces will overrun self-imposed restrictions. Technology is developed simultaneously by different players, often operating under different ethical restrictions, does not bode well for mankind’s ability to reach an agreed upon ethical agreement for information entities. As technological companies live under the Darwinian maxim of “the survival of the fittest,” there is a built-in incentive to break away from such regulations, in order to ensure one’s survival, even if this means the loss of humanity. The understanding that the logic of power has a built-in motivation to maintain a non-arbitrary governing framework that support genuine freedom is encouraging. The “noise” that non-restrained students produce in the classroom challenge the lecturer and force her to improve her lecture. Lack of total control comes with benefits. The Leibnizian reasoning of choosing the best possible world is ultimately flawed as it does not offer insight on Leibniz’s ultimate question: “why is there something rather than nothing?” Leibniz’s creation creates a world whose actuation does not add anything. There is nothing in its existence that is different than its possibility. The Scotistic creation that was developed in this chapter ties together genuine freedom, creativity, and the will to power. Together they present an evolving world that constantly adds new information and creativity to creation itself. Creation never ceases to develop, and in this respect, its existence constantly transcends its mere possibility. This is perhaps the ultimate answer to Leibniz’s question.

Chapter 7‌‌‌

Suffering, Emotions, and Rationality

While in the previous chapters we saw how Truth and the Will are interwoven in the created world, this chapter will extend that examination to the notion of the Good, for creation is, ultimately, an intentional and free act of the creating God. The horror that the previous chapter faced was facing a capricious God. Through a sophisticated solution from the viewpoint of eternity, the execution of creation was divided between a God who set the goals for creation in advance, and a sort of supercomputer that assisted him in dealing a posteriori with all possible problems along the way. This God, besides endowing creatures with freedom, is as remote as it could get. Whereas we are temporal, God perceives everything from his eternal realm. But, as we have learned, temporality is grounded in willing. This opens up the possibility to consider God’s will not only from the perspective of eternity but also as it reacts to a human’s temporal will. Fortunately for us, Christian theologians confronted this problem from the beginning in attempting to understand the meaning of Christ as holding both divine and human nature. As opposed to the God of the “philosophers,” who for all his perfections must remain deaf and silent, the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not indifferent, for otherwise, he would not have created at all. The problem of divine impassibility, i.e., whether the divine nature in Christ could suffer, stands at the center of a debate regarding the nature of God and his relation to us. While philosophical reasoning about the divine nature maintains that the divine is immutable and perfect in every respect, theological needs generated an ever-growing demand for a passionate God truly able to participate in his creatures’ suffering. This problem is not merely a theological question concerning God’s ability to feel and suffer, but rather refers to the way feelings are interwoven within the mental life. This is of particular importance as technology struggles to develop artificial intelligence. In other words, 89

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answering whether and in what way feelings are part of human rationality is crucial to dictate the kind of intelligence we aim to develop. Theology, by its nature, is concerned and troubled by the need to explain the relation between the Divine and the World. Monotheistic theologies, generally speaking, add Man to the God-World relation as a creature who is created in the image of God. The problem of the divine passibility, i.e., of whether the divine nature suffers as a result of action external to it, becomes extremely problematic in the Christianity that revolves around the figure of Christ: the incarnated logos who has both divine and human natures.1 The following will utilize the previous discussions to develop a new model for the incarnation that aims to respond to the theological concerns as well as to offer philosophy new perspectives as to how impassible and passible nature can reside in one person. Of course, this question is theological but depicts a tension that resides within the essence of the human ability to think about the ever-changing reality with means that transcend reality itself, e.g., mathematics. The topics of God’s passions and impassibility were covered thoroughly and this chapter does not aim to shed new historical light. Just to name a few, one should consider, e.g., Paul Gondreau’s extraordinary book or Robert Minder careful analysis of Aquinas’s account of the passions. Nor does the chapter aim to enter into a debate with contemporary discussions like those found in the work of Thomas G. Weinandy and others, but rather to use and sublate both historical and contemporary theological discussions into philosophical problems—chief among these was to look for a fresh account of how corporeality can affect the mental realm.2 As such the account that will be given is minimal and aims to equip the reader with the required knowledge to tackle the problem from an historical viewpoint.3 Hilary of Poitiers’s early account of Christ’s impassibility (that he rejected later) is of considerable importance as a focal point to which Christian theologians returned again and again throughout the centuries. A venerable Doctor of the Church for his battle against Arianism, he held that Christ, as the son of God, could not feel pain.4 This view endorses the notion that Christ’s body was not truly integral to him and that his suffering resembles the suffering of a robot who imitates suffering according to the information it receives from its sensors, yet does not truly suffer pain. This position that seems to be “sailing somewhat close to the cliffs of Docetism,”5 was addressed and rejected by all Catholic theologians. John Damascene’s position stands in opposition to Hilary’s view. According to Damascene, Christ assumed all man’s passions since he “assumed the whole man and everything that is his, except sin.” As a result, Christ suffered from “hunger, thirst, fatigue, pain, the tears, the destruction, the shrinking from death, the fear, the agony . . . and any other such things as are naturally

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inherent in all men.”6 Damascene posited a strict distinction between the divine and human nature of Christ, maintaining that only the divine nature was impassible: God’s Word Himself, then, endured all things in His flesh, while His divine nature, which alone is impassible, remained unaffected. For, when the one Christ made up of both divinity and humanity suffered, the passible part of Him suffered, because it was of its nature to suffer, but the impassible did not suffer with it. Thus, since the soul is passible, it does feel pain and suffer with the body when the body is hurt, although it itself is not hurt. The divinity, however, being impassible, does not suffer with the body.7

This, of course, seems to lead him to a plain dualism. Damascene turns to the will as the key to bridge between the two natures and to understanding Christ’s suffering. He explains that Christ did not suffer from these passions in the same way man does, for “it was by willing that He hungered and by willing that He thirsted, by willing that He was afraid and by willing that He died.”8 While with man the passions distract and perhaps control reason, with Christ they were permitted willingly and according to reason. The will acts as a mediator between the external world, that acts on Christ’s human body, and Christ’s soul. Medieval theologians found it difficult to reconcile between the plain statement of the scripture and the Christian dogma that stated explicitly the Christ suffered and wept etc. in his life, and Hilary’s position that states that Christ “had a body that could suffer, and did suffer, but He did not possess a nature that felt pain.” Peter Lombard, who for centuries sketched the questions scholastic theologians dealt with, followed almost identically Damascene’s Christological psychology while dismissing Hilary’s early position as “some rather obscure chapters”: For Christ had true fear and sorrow for human nature, but not like us, who have these at the highest levels. Because as a result of our sin we are, of necessity, subject to these defects, and in us these defects take the form of both propassions and passions. But in Christ they are only propassions.9

Lombard’s distinction between passions and propassions, which he borrows from Jerome,10 encapsulates the distinction between the human and divine states, allowing him to preserve “the perfect rectitude of His [Christ] soul’s spiritual faculties.”11 This distinction, to be adhered to afterwards by other key theologians such as Alexander of Hales, Albert the Great, Bonaventure, and to some degree the later Aquinas, makes it possible to claim that while man suffers pain from the external world in a passive way, Christ’s suffering,

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in which the passibility of his body is mediated in an active way by his will, is impassible. Without dwelling on the historical account of the passions, Aquinas distinguishes between the narrow/proper account, which is in keeping with the Aristotelian material account, and a more general usage. “In its proper sense passion . . . is found only in the motion of alteration . . . in which one contrary form is received and the other is driven out.” However, “in its general sense passion is the reception of something in any way at all.”12 The Aristotelian account of the soul does not elaborate much on its rational part but rather gives a more extensive treatment of the vegetative and sensitive souls. When Aquinas asks “whether there is any passion in the soul”13—the question is asked from the point of view of Christianity and its theological needs. As such, when the objector claims from an Aristotelian point of view that passions cannot reside in the intellect since the intellect is immaterial and so is not passible, or when he argues that the soul is incorruptible but passions indicate corruptibility, Aquinas needs to find a way so that passions can indeed be attributed to the soul, and thereby the soul can be granted the space it requires to explain our daily mental affairs. On the other hand, he needs to protect the eternity of the soul while at the same time making room for the plain fact that death is indeed part of our lives. Thus, though he protects the narrow material sense of passion whereby “something is received while something else is taken away,” his objective is to allow passion to be attributed to the soul. In order to resolve these difficulties he uses the Aristotelian framework in such a way that it suits his objectives, i.e., he uses Aristotle in his conceptual modifications when he harbors the general meaning of the passions in terms of the relationship between potentiality and actuality: “passivity, as implying mere reception, need not be in matter, but can be in anything that is in potentiality;”14 or where he uses Aristotle’s unity between form and matter in order to designate the corruption, and consequently death, of the union of soul and matter, and so to protect the soul. Relying on the unity between the body and the soul, Aquinas allows for a mediated affection of the soul through the body as when the passion begins with the body, e.g., when it receives an injury, and as a result the soul suffers from the weakening of the union of the body; and secondly when the passion begins with a psychological event which results in a modification within the body.15 Though the passions have a fundamental role within Aquinas’s study of human morality,16 the passions of the soul do not belong to the soul in a primary way but only secondarily. For this reason Aquinas, following Augustine, explains that “when love and joy and the like are ascribed to God or the angels, or to man in respect of his intellectual appetite, they signify simple acts of the will having like effects, but without passion.”17 In the end, though affecting our soul and mental lives, the passions of the soul are

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accidental, indirect, and are fundamentally rooted in our bodily activities. This can be seen in the manner Aquinas exploits the difference between passion and propassion. Aquinas made a significant use of propassion only in his later writings to interpret the line in the Gospel of Matthew that states that “Jesus began to be sorrowful and to be sad”:18 It is to be observed that sorrow can occur either as a passion or as a propassion. A passion transforms one, whereas a propassion does not transform one. For, when passions arise in us and cause the reason to be altered, such passions are complete, but when they do not cause the reason to be altered, they are called propassions. Since Christ’s reason was in no way altered, he experienced only propassions rather than passions, which is what the Evangelist means when he says that Jesus “began to be sorrowful.”19

Whereas passion designates an effect which starts with the body and continues to exert force on the rational mind itself, propassion designates only the first stage of passion, i.e., the sensual reception of pain which is not completed and so does not affect the mind. Thus, following Jerome’s distinction, Aquinas is able to protect Christ’s rational soul from being passible in the strong sense. Man’s rational soul, on the contrary, and due to the Fall, can be affected by the suffering of the body and is passible in a mediated sense. It is important for Aquinas to note that the fact that Christ only suffered an imperfect passion does not imply that he suffered less than a common man. According to Aquinas, since Christ had the most perfect body and understanding, and since he took upon himself the primordial sin, etc., he suffered more than anyone else. I would like to conclude this part with an observation that will become essential later. As we have seen above, according to Aquinas, Christ’s rational soul remained unpenetrated and His sufferings are accidental. Aquinas’s account, particularly in the case of Christ, aims to protect the rational soul from the passions, which are suffered only in a mediated and secondary manner. As we will see later, Scotus examines the passions from an entirely different perspective which is guided by a new reading as to what rationality is and, as a result, links the relations between the passions and the soul differently. Generally, Scotus accepts the accidental psycho-physiological account of the passions that was presented so far.20 Though he definitely has things to say about it, his systematic view considers such a view secondary, precisely because it considers the passions from the point of view of accidentality. This accidental point of view, by definition, fails, at the outset, to take into account the possibility of understanding the passions as a part of mental life which does not contradict the nature of the rational soul but rather expresses it.

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For the moment we will postpone our investigation of the passions. We will turn to examine the opposing opinions on the raison d’être of the incarnation, that in turn will pave the way to understanding the role of the will in Scotus’s consideration of the passions. Aquinas holds that though the incarnation could occur for different reasons, it is reasonable to accept the repeated statements of sacred scripture that Adam’s sin is the reason for the incarnation: For such things as spring from God’s will, and beyond the creature’s due, can be made known to us only through being revealed in the Sacred Scripture, in which the Divine Will is made known to us. Hence, since everywhere in the Sacred Scripture the sin of the first man is assigned as the reason of the Incarnation, it is more in accordance with this to say that the work of the Incarnation was ordained by God as a remedy for sin; so that, had sin not existed, the Incarnation would not have been. And yet the power of God is not limited to this; even had sin not existed, God could have become incarnate.21

Examining the incarnation from the point of view of eternity, Scotus comes to an opposing understanding. According to Scotus since God predestined the world according to the order of ends it must follow that Christ was intended prior to any determination of Adam, whether he would fall into sin or not, and so that the incarnation of Christ was necessarily predestined prior to the fall of Adam: Without prejudging the matter, it may be said that, so far as the objects intended by God are concerned, since the predestination of anyone to glory is prior by nature to the prevision of anyone’s sin or damnation . . . For it seems to be universally true that he who wills in an orderly manner, intends first that which is nearer the end; and just as he first intends one to have glory before grace, so among those predestined to glory, he who wills in an orderly manner would seem to intend first the glory of the one he wishes to be near the end, and thus he wills glory for this soul [of Christ] before he wills glory for any other soul, and for every other soul he wills glory and grace before he foresees those things which are the opposite of these habits [i.e., sin or damnation].22

Scotus explains that “in the action of an artificer the process of execution of the work is opposite to the order of intention,”23 i.e., in the creative process the end of the process comes first while it comes last in the order of execution. To hold that Christ’s incarnation was willed in order to redeem men from his sins is to hold “that God wills the means before the end.”24 As we have seen in the previous chapter, Scotus maintains that Christ could not be predestined primarily as a redeemer for that would presuppose the fall of Adam. Rather Christ was first predestined according to Christ’s glory25 independently of Sin and regardless of whether Adam would fall or not (thus that there was never

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a breach that was created by the Fall), and was only secondarily predestined as redeemer once Adam was in fact predestined to fall. Against Aquinas’s conception of the incarnation as a cure, Scotus explains that the cure in itself cannot be designed primarily but only secondarily: “Christ in the flesh was foreseen and predestined to grace and glory before Christ’s Passion was foreseen as a medicine against the fall, just as a physician wills the health of a man before he wills the medicine to cure him.”26 Jürgen Moltmann, surveying the Thomistic view, raises the problem that the incarnation as an ad hoc remedy for the Fall, “has no significance of its own.” Consequently, he continues: [T]he bond between God and man in Christ will be dissolved once reconciliation has been completed and sin, with its consequences, has been eliminated. . . . Once the incarnate Son of God has achieved the reconciliation of the world with God, he himself becomes superfluous. His mediation between the gracious God and sinful men and women is bound to come to an end when he himself ceases to have a function. . . . . Once creation has been redeemed, purified from sin and liberated from death, the God-Man no longer has any place in it.27

When the incarnation is taken in the Scotistic way, it is an act which completes and perfects the creation itself.28 The incarnation thus becomes part of every event and not simply a correction of a wrong turn on the way. However, as Pancheri warns, this does not mean that the incarnation was executed for the sake of the created, but the reverse: “the universe and man were willed for the sake of Christ, and not the other way around.”29 Perhaps the best way to understand the difference between the Scotistic and Thomistic views can be borrowed from the world of economics. The Thomistic view is more microeconomic and is focused on specific values and transactions, or in our case, on particular acts of pain or sin and consequently on specific transactions of pain that follow it. Once the assets and liabilities are balanced the transaction obviates its own need.30 As such it aims to attain a balance of the sin-pain relationship. The Scotistic view is more macroeconomic and is focused on the whole economy of creation. As such it does not consider the incarnation only as a specific act of transaction but rather as a part of a complete economic policy which aims to attain growth, better distribution of wealth and social welfare. Returning to the economic image, while the Thomistic view aims to clear the balance, the Scotistic view sees the incarnation as an economic policy through which “the invisible God” becomes manifested in the world. One may call it a policy of love or charity, others may call it a policy which assists man to be perfected and to maximize the good in the world.

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Scotus emphasis on the decisive role of intentionality and the will does not imply he disregards the physiological account. Whereas the physiological aspect of the passions explains the passions accidentally, he holds that the essence of the passions lies in the nature of the will itself. Scotus explains that in addition to passions that affect the soul indirectly as a product of the union of the soul and the body, there are passions of the soul which are utterly independent of the body: There are certain passions, which are accompanied by a mutation and an alteration of the sensitive part, which does not arrive without a change in the organ, and these are the passions of the united whole; other passions are only spiritual, they can be without a change in the organ, and such are the passions of the soul.31

Whereas the will is subordinated to the intellect in Aquinas’s thought, Scotus contends that the will is utterly independent of the intellect. It is this active freedom that allows the will to position itself in regard to the perceived objects, and so to measure them, and consequently to will or nill them: Even if something is of its own nature in agreement with the will, for example the ultimate end, it is ultimately in agreement by an act of the will which accepts and finds it complacent. And such an agreement is made by willing the object, or a disagreement by refusing the object . . . an approximation follows this object, namely an apprehension of the object to be willed or nilled, and from this last thing, it seems that a passion of the will seem to follow from the presence of the object, joy or distress.32

However, it is one thing to will or nill an event or an object that has not yet come about, where the will is free to determine its willing, and another thing to accept or reject an event or an object that has already taken place and which is presented to the apprehension of the will as a fact. For the will does not find a thing or an event acceptable simply as it appears but is rather disposed in advance to accept it, according to what it willed or nilled, and so while the apprehension is taking place, the acceptance or rejection of what is perceived is quasi-necessitated: “The will is not necessitated absolutely by the object, however, among those things that are shown to it, there can be a necessity of consequence, just as in ‘if I want, I want.’”33 Thus, since the will’s act of willing or nilling pre-wills or -nills the coming of the willed/nilled object, a passion of satisfaction or dissatisfaction necessarily arises when the willed or nilled object appears. This extends to the will’s relation to its body, as when the will accept or rejects sensual pleasures, or when one may feel satisfied after significant labor that caused pain to the body.34 The crux of Scotus’s account lies in the fact that though the will as a willing power determines what it wills or nills, the passion that accompanies

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the apprehension of the willed or nilled object cannot be produced by the will itself, “for if the will was its efficient cause, then it would be its own operation, just as ‘to will’ is caused by it and is within it.” But this is evidently not the case in passions such as sadness or other negative passions that arise unwillingly.35 To our discussion, it is important to appreciate the way the passions are related to the essence of the will in Scotus’s thought. While the passions of the soul are accidental insofar as they are caused by an external object that could be otherwise, they are not accidental in the same manner as those we have encountered with Aquinas. In Aquinas’s account the rational soul suffers passions indirectly due to its unification with the body via its sensual capacities. Such sufferings are essential to the nature of such a union between body and soul, but they are not essential to the nature of the rational soul, i.e., they are accidental to it due to its state in the world pro statu isto. In Scotus’s case, though the specific passion and its cause are accidental, being subjugated to such passions is essential to the rational soul as a willing thinking being. For that reasons Scotus’s quotes Augustine who said “the will by which we cannot be miserable cannot be said to be no will, nor to be not free.”36 While in Aquinas’s account the soul might be released from the need to suffer passions if it were to be actualized in a different unification setting, e.g., after the separated souls are restored into their bodies in the future; for Scotus, being subjugated to passions is not a punishment but the essential consequence of willing. For willing requires intention, anticipation and care, and if one were to be utterly indifferent to what is to come in the outer world, one would be in a position whereby one is utterly unaffected by anything external. Before proceeding to the centerpiece of this chapter, let me present an interim summary. Though Aquinas offers a well-developed doctrine of the passions, the passions of the soul are based in the body and the way it is composed with the soul. Consequently, as the result of the needs to protect the rational soul, he does not offer a substantial account of the passions as well as the passibility of Christ, but rather an accidental one. Through a comparison of Aquinas's and Scotus’s approaches to the incarnation, the principal constitutive role of the will and intentionality for the Scotistic thinking subject was demonstrated, transcending the Thomistic subject, that is more a responsive physiological one. This served to reevaluate the overall consideration of the discussion of the passions from a passive one, which reacts to external stimuli, to an intentional and active perspective. Consequently, the focus of our consideration of the passions was altered from the physiological center to the intentional one which is grounded in the nature of the will. It was shown that as opposed to the accidental account of Aquinas, the passions of the soul are an essential product of the will and its relation to the world. The aim of what now follows is to present a new model of the incarnation. I

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believe that this model, which is strongly grounded in the medieval doctrine of the transcendentals, offers new insight on the manner in which Christ’s two natures come together, and presents us with a God who is both impassible and passible in different respects. As stated earlier, this model is not limited solely to theological discussions and was developed, from the start, to offer a philosophical framework to think of the relation between the ever-changing reality, and the realm of the intelligible, that transcends all that is ephemeral. In The Metaphysics of the Incarnation, Richard Cross presents a view, expressed also by many theologians such as Bonaventure, Aquinas, and Scotus,37 according to which incarnation can be understood as a kind of relation which is similar to Aristotle’s third kind of relation. As oppose to a real relation where both side of the relation are affected, the third kind of relation presented by Aristotle, is one in which, though one side is really related to the other, the other remains unaffected and so immutable. An example of such a relation is the relation between the sun and the earth. Whereas the earth is warmed by the sun, and so affected by it, the sun is unchanged (aside from gravitation). Scotus explains that the hypostatic union is a non-mutual relation that is real on the one extreme and which has no real relation on the other extreme.38 So it is argued that “the human nature is really related to the Word without there being a corresponding real relation in the Word.”39 According to the relational view God became man not as a result of a change within God but rather due to a change in the created order. This view, Cross explains, seems to empty “the Incarnation of any real content.”40 The becoming of Christ is a result of the union between the divine and human nature, which is not a real becoming but rather is a relation.41 Consequently a truth regarding something can be changed not because the thing itself changes but rather as a result of a change in the object which is related to it. In this way no casual relation necessitates God. Cross presents the following schematization of the relationship between the divine and the human natures so as to “allow for the Word to change, to suffer, and to be temporal.” This, he explains, is a product of what he calls extrinsic relations, that he labels relational mutability or “R-Mutability.”42 On the other hand he assigns the terms “I-mutability” and “I-immutability” to designate what is intrinsically mutable and immutable. According to the relational understanding of the incarnation, while Christ is R-mutable, He is I-immutable. As to impassibility Cross explains that the relational view of incarnation deals quite easily with the becoming of the incarnation: “Becoming man is merely a sort of change” and is not a result of a change within the divine nature but rather with the world.43 In this respect being impassible is equivalent to I-immutable. However Cross explains that it is more difficult to explain whether the actual incarnate being is impassible. The two relations that Cross presents—the intrinsic and extrinsic ones—seem

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to leave us in a stalemate. On the one hand, the extrinsic relation leaves the divine nature utterly independent of human nature and immutable, which seems to support Hilary’s claim that the divine Christ did not really suffer on the cross. On the other hand, the intrinsic relation cannot give an account of how the impassible divine nature can truly suffer. In the following I will argue that a third relation can be added that mitigates the two intrinsic and extrinsic relations that Cross presented and that such a relation can overcome the stalemate we were left in. Chapter 4 pointed to the fact that though Scotistic thought penetrates all levels of philosophy and theology, oddly it is missing a doctrine of truth which brings to the fore the implications of Scotus’s thought on the notion of truth. Scotus, as we have seen, explains that while natural action must act with necessity when a proximate reception relation is constituted with the thing acted upon, free action can elicit opposite effects without necessity whenever there is no impediment between the agent and that which it acts upon. Thus, while natural acts are determined by an external cause, a free agent “has of itself the ability to elicit contrary actions as regards the same thing.”44 Whereas the will is a rational power absolutely, for it wills or nills between opposites, the intellect, as a natural agent, is a rational power only in a qualified manner since it cannot but be “determined of itself in regard to what it directs”:45 “[T]o have opposites in its power is something a rational potency possesses primarily and per se as a proper attribute of it qua rational. For this is what distinguishes it from an irrational potency.”46 Thus, if we take seriously Scotus’s position that rationality attains completion not at the level of the intellect but at that of the will, the notion of truth needs to be reevaluated so that the will genuinely perfects our understanding of truth. Following Kant’s famous distinction between analytic a priori truths it was shown above that while the former corresponds to the intellect, synthetic a priori truths, specifically those of geometry, correspond with the power of the will insofar as they are not determined according to necessity but could be otherwise. This ontological “Scotistic” reading of the Kantian distinction, which puts more emphasize on the manner of existence, offers a third kind of relation that posits a new avenue to consider both incarnation and impassibility: Though being Euclidean or non-Euclidean is determined analytically, the fact that this world is Euclidean or non-Euclidean is a synthetic a priori truth that could have been otherwise. Hence, if one “wills” a triangle to exist in a non-Euclidean world, rather than a Euclidean one, then one causes a change in a synthetic truth about the triangle. Such a change lies somewhere in between an intrinsic change in the nature of the triangle and a purely extrinsic change in how the triangle relates to some other object. The truthfulness of truths of the will and truths of the intellect are radically different. Whereas the latter is determined internally and obeys solely the

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law of non-contradiction, the truthfulness of the former is grounded externally. Supposing that we cannot seriously claim to have anything to do with determining the world to be Euclidean or non-Euclidean, regardless of which geometry is actually applied to the world, or to our thought, this is simply a fact of reality. For, otherwise, the intellect could have known by its own powers why it is that Euclidean or non-Euclidean geometry is applied. But this it cannot do, and consequently it follows that our ability to attain such knowledge is grounded in something external to the intellect: reality itself. Let us consider this from the perspective of Cross’s internal-external relations. Insofar as internal relations go, it can be said that the fact that a triangle has three angles is an internal relation which is derived from its definition as a polygon with three sides. However, and as Kant has shown us, the fact that a triangle has 180° is not a result of an intrinsic relation. In fact, it can be said that insofar as the triangle is taken from its internal definition, it is indifferent to whether the geometry is Euclidean or non-Euclidean, or in other words, the triangle is I-immutable to any specific geometry. However, it is clear that in different geometrical worlds the triangle may assume different “truths” according to the manner in which it expands, one for a Euclidean world and others for non-Euclidean worlds. This solution preserves, on the one hand, a change which is “merely a sort of change”47 that does not involve a change in the sense of warming up or cooling down, for the assumption does not involve that from which it is changed. On the other hand, it evades the fate of Cross’s relational consideration of the incarnation, which leaves it empty of any real content. It is no big secret that the doctrine of the incarnation does not leave us with much understanding as to the manner in which the divine and human natures are brought together “not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same.”48 The modified Scotistic reading of synthetic a priori truths as truths of the will entails a new avenue for considering the incarnation. Instead of thinking of the incarnation as a sort of mixture or composite of the divine and human natures, I suggest thinking of the triangle example as a model whereby the actualization of the triangle in a specific geometry incarnates the geometrical synthetic a priori truths in the analytic truths of the triangle. Whatever geometry applies to this world, though does not apply necessarily, is a transcendental conditioning of any extended being in this specific world. This factual truth, that could have been otherwise, could not have been determined internally from the nature of extension but is rather determined externally by reality itself. Consequently, and though we cannot give an account of the why or the how, such a determination falls under the category of the will insofar as it requires a power that “has of itself the ability to elicit contrary actions.”49 Though, in themselves, truths of the intellect are immutable, they transcendentally assume, in a synthetic a priori manner, new

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attributes that are applied to them in this specific world-incarnation. This synthetic and transcendental relation constitutes real existential truths which are external to the thing’s essence and to which it remains in itself indifferent. Consequently, though truths of the will do not alter the nature of a thing, an additional real element is added in a synthetic way that perfects it. Considering again the incarnation of Christ as two natures in one person, it can be said that these two natures represent two levels of truth. One corresponds to the immutable truths of the intellect, which are eternal and transcend any worldly particularization. The other nature, the “human” nature, is a worldly nature insofar as it manifests the sets of truths that are applied and made true in this contingent and specific world. As such, by its nature, it is a nature that expresses contingent truths that are as they are because they are the product of will that is applied to the actualization of this world. And just as the nature of the triangle is not altered as a result of its manifestation in a Euclidean or non-Euclidean world, so are the divine nature and the human nature brought together in one unified manner that does not jeopardize divine immutability. A change in synthetic truths about the divine is neither an intrinsic change in the divine nature, which would compromise divine immutability, nor the mere bringing of the divine nature into an extrinsic relation to human nature, which would empty the incarnation of content. Rather, it is a determination of a “truth of the will” about the divine, i.e., a specific incarnation/determination of the divine nature in a specific world, whose contingent characteristics are products of divine will. It is important to recall that Christ’s incarnation needs to be perceived as twofold. As we saw, Scotus teaches that Christ’s incarnation was predestined primarily in order to perfect creation itself and only secondarily to redeem man. As a result, it can be said that Christ’s “human” nature primarily needs to be understood cosmologically insofar as it perfects the cosmos, and only secondarily in a human sense insofar as he perfects or redeems Man from his fallen state. Consequently, Christ’s human nature thus incarnates the divine nature with “cosmological truths” as well as with “human truths” and values. The suggested new model for understanding the incarnation, which is grounded in a new understanding of the dual layers of truth and the way they are built into one other, offers us a new path to consider the passions of the soul as imbedded within what are known as the transcendentals. Let us recall. The transcendentals are primitive notions such as being, thing, one true, and good, that precede the division into the categories, and apply to all of them. It is the most fundamental doctrine regarding beings insofar as they are beings and regardless of any further determination, and are different significations of the same thing, one addresses the thing beingness, another its whatness or

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its adequation to the mind, etc. As such, the transcendentals are coextensive, they logically echo in one another. All this becomes relevant to our discussion since truth and good are transcendentals and consequently coextensive. It follows that the presented distinction between truth of the intellect and truth of the will needs to be echoed in the notion of the good. This will offer us a transcendental avenue to consider the passions and specifically the relation between the passibility and impassibility of God. As opposed to the typical psycho-physical treatments of the passions and impassibility, a transcendental account will allow us to situate them within the most fundamental structure of reality, and its relation to thought. Following Aristotle, Scotus maintains that the good and the perfect are the same.50 He distinguishes between two meanings of perfection. The first kind is what he calls intrinsic perfection or essential goodness that addresses a thing’s form or essence and designates the integrity of the thing, i.e., the lack of imperfection. The second one, the extrinsic, designates perfection toward an end or a harmony with something else.51 The first kind of goodness refers to the perfection of the thing as it exists. As such there is no sense in speaking of a contrary which is a thing in itself but rather only of a degree of perfection the thing is actualized in. Thus, under this kind of self-relating goodness, the perfection of the thing can be designated insofar as a thing is good or deprived of its perfection and so non-good; for example an apple can be measured as a more or less perfect apple. The same thing can be said about a man, who can be judged according to his perfection. Needless to say, Christ is perfect. The second goodness: an outcome, which is measured according to whether the desired good is attained or according to a desired harmony, has as a contrary a real possible outcome. So it follows that such a good “has evil as its privative opposite.”52 The reason for that is that this kind of goodness is based upon an outcome which is desired, and in which exists, by definition, an opposing state of affairs which is considered bad. For example, if one desires to feed the poor and the outcome is that one couldn’t do that, what is manifested is evidently bad. These two meanings of good as essential and intrinsic, and extrinsic good having an end or establishing harmonious relations with others, seem to match the distinction between truth of the intellect and truth of the will, respectively. The first, that can be called good of the intellect, corresponds to and measures the adequation between the thing and the immutable “divine” truths of its form. The second, that can be called good of the will, measures the adequation between the desired end and the external actuality. Whereas good of the intellect and truth of the intellect have a plain measured relationship whereby the thing as it exists is equated with its form, the relationship between the good of the will and truth of the will is more

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complex. On the one hand, truth of the will is based upon the truth of the intellect, as when the 180° of the triangle presupposes the analytic nature of the triangle. On the other hand, the 180° are not simply chosen as a product of an arbitrary act of willing. It requires an external justification or a reason according to the desired end, for as we have seen in the second part, “he who wills in an orderly manner, intends first that which is nearer the end.” Thus it follows that the truths of the will are co-derived from contingent desired goods, and from the necessary truths of the intellect that are disposed for use, like the concept of a triangle. Moreover, these two types of good correspond differently to their actualization. Whereas good of the intellect presents a self-to-self adequation between the thing as it exists and the thing according to its nature, and so is utterly blinded to any externality, and consequently is impassible, the good of the will is by its nature passible since it is, by definition, intentional and so reaches out to the world in a manner that is sensitive to whether its desires are fulfilled or not. The transcendental analysis which distinguishes between the essential good of the intellect and the desirable good of the will, opens up an intentional sphere within the transcendental system that is logically passible insofar as it is, by definition, attenuated and quasi-conditioned by a pre-desired end. Let us recapitulate the presented incarnation model: Just as the earth is affected by the sun whereas the sun is unaffected by the earth, incarnation could be seen as a relationship whereby one side has an effect on the other while the other remains unaffected and so immutable. However, such a view results in a stalemate as it empties “the Incarnation of any real content” since it is the world that changes while God does not. It was shown that the Scotistic doctrine of truth offers an answer to the stalemate: Whereas the truth level that corresponds to the intellect cannot suffer change, while the one that corresponds to the will can suffer “a sort of change” insofar as it can be actualized in different geometries or “worlds.” This understanding of truth was then further elaborated to present a new model of the incarnation that answers Cross’s stalemate; for, just as Euclidean geometry actualizes the triangle in a specific manner, so we can consider the incarnation in the flesh to be a specific actualization of the divine nature. The divine is thus divided into a necessary element which is immutable and a contingent element that can suffer “a sort of change.” Relying upon transcendental considerations, the presented incarnation model, and its grounding doctrine of truth, was organically extended to the domain of the good. This transcendental shift presented an intentional space within the logic of the transcendentals and a new avenue to consider an impassible and caring God who is transcendentally disposed toward his creatures and creation.

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It is clear that Christ as the incarnated logos is not a product of necessity but was rather desired by the Divine Will as a part of His desired good. Thus it follows that the incarnation of Christ, which can be seen both from a cosmological perspective as well as a human one, is an incarnation of the divine nature, and contingent truths of the will. Christ’s contingent truths of the will can be taken according to Aquinas’s view of the incarnation, which primarily sees Christ from man’s point of view, or from the Scotistic perspective that sees Christ primarily from the cosmological-creationist point of view and only secondarily as a man. Be that as it may, it can be said that the incarnation of Christ is an incarnation of an impassible and necessary nature that we designate as the divine nature, and a contingent and passible element of human nature as well as the physical nature of the cosmos. And this is what is called the human-cosmological nature. The assumption of human nature does not simply imply that God assumed a human body but most of all assumed humanity as a set of values and moral attitudes. Thus, whereas the divine part is indifferent to worldly matters, the human part is concerned with worldly matters and passions such as joy or sorrow that accompany the correspondence between his disposition toward the world and the world as it is manifested to it. The discussion, though centered around Christ’s im/passibility and passions, corresponds with the body-mind problem since the essence of the problems is the same. For our lives are “acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence.”53 The cosmological reading of the incarnation allows us to view the body-mind problem not as a problem between two natures but rather three, one which is necessary and eternal, the divine, and the other two, the human and physical natures, that are contingent, temporal and passible. Some might argue that the present account does not change anything in regard to the body-mind problem, for we still need to give an account of how the human and physical natures are brought together. This is evidently true, but as the account presented here is metaphysical, it not interested in how things interact (for this can occur in different manners in different possible worlds). Instead, the account tried to reduce the tension between the body and the mind. The classical body-mind problem does not have problems with the human and physical natures simply taken, but rather with the contradiction between what is eternal, infinite, indivisible, immutable, etc., and what is temporal, limited, divisible and mutable, etc. The account presented has tried to show how such contradictory attributes can be incarnated, whereas the human and physical natures are placed on the same side, so they are not as alien as they were once thought to be.

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The transcendental account of the passions offers some food for thought, requiring artificial intelligence scientists to grapple with what thinking is. Is thinking and calculating the same thing? Does finding the quickest route, maximizing profit, or being able to win a chess match exemplify intelligence in the fullest sense, or is it maybe just an algorithmic ability to efficiently reach a desired goal? Can we truly speak of an intelligible agency that is not capable of desiring its own ends? Does being algorithmically rational endow one with the ability to make moral decisions? Suffering and joy are not simple physiological responses but are deep expressions of one’s involvement and responsibility; they express man’s capacity to desire and achieve his own goals. Information technology has leveraged the logic of emotions that governs man and his will, to shepherd and assemble his flock, and to capitalize on it. Will computation machines be able to will as man does, and to suffer the outcome when a reversal takes place? Facebook and its like excel in understanding our desires and manipulating us to their own ends. But like psychopaths, caring for others does not motivate their decisions. As information technology reaches an optimization in its ability to understand our desires and to comply with them, the will will find itself in a place where its desires are always met, or never face a reality that contradicts it. What kind of agency will be left for man, if (virtual) reality never contradicts it? Can we truly speak of values when no one has to suffer for lack of them? Information technology offers mankind an outlook that, on the one hand, resembles the Garden of Eden, but on the other hand castrates him, preventing him from truly living. What is required is not an answer to our immediate needs but rather a system that perceives us as human beings, directed at developing that which makes us human rather than being a dumb sheep in a flock. A constructive design should not center on pleasing the participants of the “realities” with which man surrounds himself, but on developing his personality, at times complying with his desires, on others denying its fulfilment, always in service of the development of man himself. If I were to choose a desired image for the system it would be that of the lover that tends and cares for the beloved. But in caring, the lover does not necessarily submit himself to the will of the beloved. Instead, the lover is focused on the erotic tension between them, ensuring the continuous growth of their love.

Chapter 8‌‌‌

Causality and Information

For centuries, the physicalist image dictated how we perceive reality, and through it, our world: We are nothing but stardust.1 The emerging information revolution is fundamentally altering our picture of reality. It is not that one rejects the notion that we are made out of atoms and the laws of physics that govern them. This is still a valid truth that no one denies. Instead, the information revolution changes the centrality of this truth, positioning it as of secondary importance for our lives, one that we can transcend. As information technology allows us to surmount physical boundaries and instead to pose alternative realities that act according to different rules, one rearranges one’s conception of reality not according to the veracity of physics but rather according to systems of beliefs and desires. Assisted by countless machines and computation devices, we surround ourselves with alternative realities that respond to our command and hidden needs. Nature is still there but is masked, and does not interfere with the progress of our lives. As we perceive it, reality no longer follows physical causality but rather our desires and needs. Thus, we are facing changing shifts between physical causality and human causality, guided by our will. Becoming is a process in which a thing moves from one state to another; it is that through which creation moves toward its “destination.” The previous chapter revolved around the question of the passions and whether God can suffer and have genuine feelings toward his creatures. The Scotistic doctrine of the will, that willingly positions the self in a manner that reacts to events, paves the way for considering how the will participates as a cause. In this chapter we will further develop Scotus’s conception of contingency and freedom to examine the manner in which the future springs out of the past, and particularly to rethink the position of the final cause. This will allow us to think anew about the question of causality and becoming within a broader category, that of information. Following Aristotle, the Scholastics spoke of four types of causes that describe the process of becoming: material, formal, efficient, and final.2 The 107

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material cause refers to what the thing is made of while the formal produces what is formed, the role of efficient causality is to produce transformations in matter or move things from their initial place to another, and final causality pertains to an end.3 As the Scholastics of the late thirteenth century were well acquainted with the thought of Aristotle, they used the four causes as an integral part of their discussions. Whereas scholars such as Aquinas and Suarez devoted extensive and focused discussion to causality,4 Duns Scotus uses the four causes throughout his investigations as an integral part of his examinations. The following does not intend to present a detailed discussion of Scotus’s conception of the four causes doctrine but rather to use the previous discussions to shed new light on causality. Aquinas explains that while material and formal causes “are called ‘intrinsic’ to the thing, because they are parts constituting the thing,” final and efficient causes “are called ‘extrinsic’ because they are outside the thing.”5 Whereas all the four causes bring about change, only the efficient cause addresses how the change takes place: The material cause is responsible for change in that it is the item that persists through and underlies the change; the formal cause is the characteristic which the changing thing comes to possess; and the final cause is that for the sake of which the change occurs. But in addition to these three, something more is needed to account for how the change actually comes to take place.6

Whereas the modern mechanistic understanding of efficient causality is concerned with the delivery of motion or momentum from the cause to the effect, the Aristotelian tradition identified efficient causality not solely with the transmitted change but emphasized that what makes an efficient cause a cause is the fact that the change originated from it: it is that from “where” the change begins. In the Physics, Aristotle explains that the “where” of the efficient cause is both a “where the origin of the motion [comes] from,”7 that designates the location where the change begins, as well as, and even more importantly, the source of origination or beginning of the motion.8 By holding that efficient causality is that from where the motion of a change begins, efficient causality must be understood from the point of view of agency, not simply as transmitting motion, as the mechanistic billiard-ball view of the universe understands it, but rather as something that actualizes the motion. This origination of change needs to be understood both insofar as the agency uses instruments to exercise causality and insofar as quantity cannot originate an act of its own volition but requires an agency to actualize the quantity in a certain manner. In the first instrumental respect Scotus explains that

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“cutting apart” insofar as it is an action does not come from the saw. For if cutting apart is a locomotion, then the saw does not actively move [anything], but merely is moved passively by the principal agent. . . . the saw does not of itself possess [the capacity for] cutting apart, but the motion that is imparted by the hand, as well as the cutting apart that follows, are two effects of an agent that acts according to a certain order. . . . Therefore neither the saw nor the ax acts with efficient causality, but only passively, insofar as each is moved by an agent.9

Instruments are used passively by the agency to bring about the change. In the second respect, because quantity alone cannot effect efficient cause, Scotus explains: [A]ctual quantity is not a principle of any action . . . how does food nourish by its substantive power? . . . in the food itself there is no efficient cause for growth; rather this is to be found in the living [organism] converting the food.10

Aristotle did not attribute the “where” of origination only to efficient causality. In the same place in the Physics he spoke of the “where” of origination as both efficient and final causalities.11 This dual attribution is an expression of the fact that final and efficient causes cause together and that this co-causation forms a hierarchy in which final causality governs efficient causality. Final causality does not cause in the manner efficient causality causes, i.e., by bringing things into existence but rather “the causality of the final cause moves efficient cause to act.”12 Scotus thus does not understand the four causes as being distinct from one another but rather as co-causing in an essentially ordered and unified causation: The four kinds of causes are essentially ordered in their causation of one and the same thing. . . . how then will they [the four causes] produce the same thing if they do not at least cause together? Insofar as they are causing the effect, then, they possess a unity of order. By reason of this order they become a functional unit as regards causation.13

From this preliminary discussion we conclude that both efficient and final causes are kinds of causing agencies that, together, co-cause a change, one in reference to its how and one pertaining to its end. In the wake of the scientific revolution led by mechanistic physics, our commonsensical understanding of causality reduced final cause to efficient cause, and our understanding of efficient cause was transformed from “a power that brings a potentiality in something else into actuality” to a “mechanical transfer of motion between colliding bodies.”14 As defined by the mechanistic imagination, we perceived the world as governed by posterior events that

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through mechanical and determined collisions dictate posterior effects, which in turn bring about sequential determined effects. According to this view, particularly regarding non-thinking beings, the past contains within itself the power to determine the future and does not require final causation. William Ockham, a forerunner of the mechanistic revolution, stated that it is no real question to ask for what reason a fire is generated . . . . [N]atural agents proceed anew from rest into action at the moment when an impediment is removed. For instance, a fire is now close to the wood and previously was not.15

Henrik Lagerlund explains that wood “burns, because that is just what fire does, which means that you only need efficient causality to explain the burning of wood by the fire.”16 The problem with Ockham’s claim, that is in line with Scotus’s key distinction between natural and volitional faculties/powers, is that his postulation that wood burns because it is what fire does, is not necessarily a true statement, and one could easily imagine a world where fire does not burn, or an instance where a bush burns without being consumed—a theological fact Ockham must accept.17 This means that one cannot claim that efficient causality is ruled by necessity, though in specific settings it might act quasi-necessarily. This is exemplified in Scotus’s distinction between two types of necessity: [N]ecessity is twofold: one is necessity of immutability and another of inevitability. One speaks of the necessity of immutability when [something] cannot be otherwise: God is a necessary being in this way. Necessity of inevitability, however, is [present] when an outcome of some future matter is said to be inevitable, although in itself [the thing involved] is neither immutable nor necessary. For example, it is necessary with the necessity of inevitability that the sun will rise tomorrow, and other natural movements are necessary in this way, and nevertheless they could be otherwise, and hence are not necessary nor immutable in an unqualified sense . . . [N]ecessity in an unqualified sense is not found in things or in any effects, but only the qualified type is: because in relation to their proximate causes some effects (namely, every natural effect) are necessary. But in every effect or thing willed by us—qua such—there is no necessity but only contingency.18

In the Scotistic framework, the laws of nature are necessary not in an absolute manner but are inevitable within a specific ordained state of affairs: “Even one that acts by nature, acts for some end, where the teleology is less obvious.”19 Their necessity is only secundum quid, qualified and localized to support God’s preordained goals. In fact, Scotus’s radical conception of freedom, primarily God’s radical freedom, brought him to claim that, if God desires, he can act absolutely and replace the ordained laws with new ones.20

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Efficient causes are thus local to the specific ordained environment that governs specific systems. This ordination is not natural for it requires ordination of one possible system against other possible systems, i.e., the ordination is determined by an act of will which dictates the governing system that rules efficient causality. This localization of efficient causality to an ordained context qualifies the howness of the efficient causality insofar as this howness is calibrated to an intended ordained system that serves an intended end, i.e., it is qualified to serve final causality. As the Scotistic world is contingent through and through, except those things that entail a contradiction—to which the laws of nature do not belong—it follows that the laws of nature should be seen as “necessary” for creatures insofar as, in their specific state, God desired them to produce only whatever they produce. However, from God’s point of view, they are contingently designed to serve his prior and eternal desires. As there is nothing in the “past,” or within efficient causality, that makes it capable of determining contingently which future will come about, it follows that a causality that can choose otherwise is required. This grounds the subordination of efficient causality to final causality. The past only determines a point of departure that opens a manifold of possible futures. But as it lacks the ability to choose a specific future from among other possible futures, it cannot serve as that which brings about the becoming of the future. The Scotistic contention is that, as reality and the laws that govern it are radically contingent, their determination fundamentally falls under the category of the will, i.e., the capacity to determine one possible alternative rather than another. Thus it follows that past events and efficient causality, even when they do not involve thinking beings, produce effects from within themselves only in a secondary manner, i.e., insofar as they were determined to act in this or that way. Consequently, the movement from the past to the future does not follow naturally from itself, and as neither efficient causality or the past are capable of discriminating and choosing between contingent possibilities, the future must be determined by another type of causality that “can perform either this act or its opposite, or can either act or not act at all,” i.e., a causality that falls under the category of freedom.21 Does this mean that only our will decides what will take place? Of course not. We constantly experience the fact that almost everything that happens around us is determined externally. These determinations do not present themselves as possible futures of our choosing. Instead they present themselves as possible alternative futures that will be determined externally, i.e., contingent futures that can be determined otherwise but not by our will. In this respect, whatever determination comes about is simply given to us as determined.22

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The leap from the past to the future requires a discriminating faculty that determines a specific future and such discrimination is set by a desired end. The Scotistic view is focused on possibilities and the fact that a determination of possibilities requires a will, means that the becoming of the future requires a “past” from where efficient causality exercises its power to leap into the future. As we recall, the “where” of efficient causality has two aspects: 1. the “where” from which efficient cause brings about the leap or change, and which determines the scope of open future possibilities; 2. the “where” of agency whence the change or leap originates. This “where” points to an agency that brings about the execution of the will by using the ax to cut the wood. Turning the common-sensical-mechanistic perspective of causality— which views the unfolding of events as a sort of pushing from the past to the future into a modal leap model, where one leaps from one set of possibilities to another—means that ultimately causality also works discretely from the future to the past, limiting many possible futures to specific futures. Efficient and final causality works in a complementary manner. Efficient causality determines which futures are possible both in respect to their “location” and to their capacity for actualization. Final causality is the kind of causality that determines the leaping destination, distinguishing it from other possibilities. Though efficient agency determines how much leaping power we have, it is not a quantity but rather something which has quantity and knows how to mobilize quantity and instruments to achieve a change. As such, efficient causality does not desire or want whatever it produces. Efficient and final causalities co-cause together. The question is what kind of co-causation is involved here. As we have seen in chapter 5, Scotus examines two ways by which causes can co-cause essentially. In Participative co-causation the superior cause moves the inferior cause. In autonomous co-causation both causes, whether equal in power or not, are independent, and no production can come to be without the participation of the other cause. Scotus attributes to efficient causality some aspects of autonomy, e.g., he maintained that the ax as an instrument alone does not suffice to explain the movement and that an agent is required to explain the act of cutting the wood. Similarly, Scotus contends that the food alone cannot act as an efficient cause and that an efficient cause needs to give an account of the process by which the food is transformed into flesh or energy. Efficient causality thus manifests a natural origination of processes. In contrast, final causality causes the origination of things freely. The co-causation of efficient and final causality is that of an autonomous co-causation since no production can come about without the participation of the other cause. However, this co-causation is not between equals for it is the latter causality that governs the former as nature serves the will.

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But in what respect it can be said that final causality actually causes or bring about the future? Aquinas explains that “the final cause is the cause of the efficient cause, not in the sense that it makes it be, but inasmuch as it is the reason for the causality of the efficient cause. For an efficient cause is a cause inasmuch as it acts, and it acts only because of the final cause.”23 Similarly, understanding that final causality lacks the efficient force required to enforce the bringing about of the future, Scotus accepted Aristotle’s contention that in contrast to efficient causality that “moves properly,” “the final cause moves metaphorically the efficient cause to bringing about its effect.”24 In his commentary on the fifth book of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, Scotus devotes extensive treatment to the question of in what sense the end can function as a cause. In other words, if the end in itself does not “really” exist, in what sense is it said to exist at all, and more importantly, what is the manner by which it causes? Scotus holds that the end as a cause is something that has a quasi-objective and formal being (quasi esse obiectivum et esse formale). He rejects the idea that an end as a potential being can be a final cause that causes the efficient cause and contends that the final cause must be real and really exist. A final cause does not move as a future or potential entity, but rather when it is good or desirable in the mind and willed or nilled by the will. The final cause is thus an intended and desired object: “The end is a cause insofar as it is in the mind of the agent. . . . it is there as having a quasi-objective and formal being.”25 The end exists in the mind insofar as it is desired, and this desire is prior to the efficient act whereby that which is desired is attained. In this respect final causality is prior to efficient causality. There are different types of things one can desire. One possibility is to wish for something, e.g., I wish I were a billionaire. Such a wish does not allow itself to be translated into practical steps, at least in my case. However, this does not mean that such a wish is without any consequences, for wishing to be a billionaire may cause a passion of jealousy or frustration that, in turn, would sabotage my relations with others.26 Thus, though wishing something does not entail practical implementation, it might affect us by creating within us a disposition toward things. In another way, the will desires things more concretely, things one can actually bring oneself to attain, e.g., writing on Duns Scotus and the question of creation. To do that, I need to be convinced that my idea is worthwhile, I need to bring myself to read the needed literature and work out different conundrums as I progress. This practicality is essential when one considers final causality, for final causality becomes efficient only when one commits oneself to attain an end. This commitment means that the will makes itself will both the end as well as realizing the needed choices that are required along the way—and the costs of such realizations. Final causality thus does not only commit one to an end but to a practical execution of

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the will at different points that actively transforms one’s capital (i.e., efficient resources) and molds it into the desired end. Scotus’s answer, that final causality exists in the mind, and that the act of willing causes what the will desires as an object, does not present us with a clear understanding of how willing a specific end produces a becoming process and its dynamics. In the previous chapter we examined a Scotistic solution to the question in what sense a perfect and immutable being can be said to suffer. As we have seen, Scotus holds that when the will wills, it freely and actively positions itself in contiguity to the perceived objects or events. This act of positioning itself in relation to objects or events measures them according to their desirability and consequently wills or nills them. Thus, since the will’s act of willing or nilling pre-wills or nills, the coming of the willed/nilled object, a passion of satisfaction or dissatisfaction necessarily arises when the willed or nilled object appears. The passions of the soul do not only elucidate the manner of final and efficient causes, but also explicate the dialectics between them. The will, by desiring an outcome, positions itself. This positioning is not simply a positioning vis-à-vis objects or events taken simply but rather with respect to possible futures. By positioning itself in relation to possible futures, the will commits itself to possible outcomes and the passions that will arise, which would be positive passions if a desired outcome came about or negative passions if a non-desired outcome emerged. These passions, that are the product of the will’s comparison between what it wants and what came about, act as efficient causes to the extent that they efficiently move the will to act. This is most evident with negative passions that produce active measures to attain the desired goals. Let us consider the following example. Sarah is forty years old without a mate and desires to have a child. She desires a child not solely in a wishful manner, but she is now committed to having a child. This commitment drives her to consider possible alternatives, either to find a husband, or to find someone with whom to have a child together without becoming a couple, or, in the last resort, to have the child alone. These alternatives are not of equal value as she would prefer to have a child with a husband, both for the child’s sake and for her own. But she is willing to accept the fact that, as she has not been able to find a husband up to now, looking for the love of her life, or something close to it, might jeopardize her primary objective—having a child—and she is willing to sacrifice, at least in the immediate future, the goal of finding such love. Thus, if such a husband is not found in the coming few months, she will try to find a partner who also desires to have a child but without creating a fully functioning family (she is already starting to look around and to prepare the ground for a possible partner even before the first options expires). This is not the best situation but it is better than raising the child alone, so she thinks. As

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she is not young any more, she also starts to inquire and make the needed appointments with clinics that assist women to become pregnant. On top of all that, she is aware of the fact that her chances of conceiving a child are low and she starts fertility treatments. As she proceeds with the process she is not rewarded with good fortune. She did not genuinely believe a true love would present itself soon enough but was willing to give it one last chance. But, as she suspected, no suitable partner turned up. Passions accompany her throughout her journey, expressing the sacrifice her desire requires. As she let go of the preferred possibility, she mourned her youthful dreams of the perfect family and romantic love. But she remembered what was at stake. As she could not find anyone who would be willing to share parenthood without forming a family, she mourned her future offspring’s lack of a father, the confidence and other important traits fathers provide their children. She accepted her fate and moved forward to obtain a sperm donation. Ultimately the child is what she truly desired. After a few implants that did not produce a child, and the suffering that accompanied the lack of ability to fulfill her desire, she started more active fertility treatment. This cost her a substantial amount of money, but she was not willing to give up on her desire for a child. Sarah finally conceived a child and had a cute little baby. Her desire was fulfilled. She had to suffer and pay a lot to attain it, and unless things change, she will raise her child without a father, without a companion. All the concessions she made along the way were made in order to pursue her primary desire, making sure that the small window of possible opportunity she had, that was closing, would not shut off completely. As she moved along from a more desirable future to a less desirable one, her concessions bought her the possibility to actualize her desire. These concessions directed the way the efficient causality affected her in conceiving her baby. Without giving up her search for a husband and later a father for the child, the baby would not have come into being. Without starting the use of sperm donation, and later fertility treatments, her baby would not have come into existence. All these concessions that are grounded in Sarah’s commitment to her primary goal are translated into efficient causes that moved her to make decisions without which the child would not have come into being. As we have seen in chapter 5, God foreseen in advance all possible futures and designed in advance his reactions to any possible future in order to make sure that his intended goals are achieved. As a result, God discriminated, before creation, between a sanctioned state of affairs, and an unsanctioned state of affairs, i.e., every state of affairs that takes place, even though it was not necessarily a desired outcome, was approved in advance insofar as it could deliver whatever goals God had chosen before creating the world. As God does not know men’s choices ahead of time, and as he needs to determine his actions in advance without knowing how the future will unfold, and,

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presupposing that God aims to optimize his a priori decisions, God must rely on an autonomous algorithm that measures in advance which alternative is better and determines appropriate reactions to different future outcomes. In this respect God is just like Sarah who considered in advance the possible outcomes as well as the commitments to and reactions to the future as it unfolds. Like Sarah, his reactions are the result of a prior goal which governs his reactions, and a calculus which aims to maximize the amount of goodness that accompanies the attainment of the desired good, without jeopardizing or preventing the attainment of such a good. Also, like Sarah, God is subject to passions that accompany the choice of the desired good and the unfolding of events. However there are also two essential differences between Sarah and God. Unlike Sarah, God is all-powerful, and if desired, will have a child. Also, and perhaps more interesting for our discussion, the efficient causality that is in play in God’s case moves God to intervene in reality. This could be effected through “miracles” or by changing the laws that govern reality. As we recall, Scotus contends that God can replace one set of ordinate laws with another. This alteration causes a change in the manner reality operates and can bring about new outcomes. When Sarah plans first to try to find a husband, then to look for a partner, and finally to have a child alone, each scenario expresses a different set of laws that is replaced in accordance with her ability to attain her goal. They are not desired equally, and she switches from one set to another as the window to attain her goal narrows.27 Whereas the previous discussion was an attempt to understand how Scotus’s philosophy of contingency and the importance of the will affect the way efficient and final causality co-cause together, the remainder of the chapter is ontological. Its aim is to understand the kind of being that can volitionally cause. Following the proximity between matter and memory that was discussed in chapter 2, it will argue that causality should not be perceived solely from the physical point of view but also from the aspect of information and meaning. Conceiving matter as memory offers a new vista to consider the relation between material, formal, efficient, and final causalities, particularly the way they underlie the different types of memory. The first type of memory acts as a conserver and carrier of the past, or of forms. In this respect matter acts as the material cause, which is independent of the forms themselves but without which the forms could not have become memorized or actualized. The second type of memory maintains the species or forms as standing alone and for themselves. This kind of memory is not a memory of particular things or events that happened in reality but rather grounds our knowledge, and for this reason it was called transcendental remembering. When matter receives whatever material forms, it acts as a transcendental memory. That which is remembered first conforms to the transcendental features of the memory as the

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ground for the actualization, and second to the nature or essence of that which is actualized. This intrinsic conditioning is what we can call formal causality. The third type of memory, which elicits actual knowledge, is extracted from memories. This act brings together efficient and final causalities since eliciting is an act of the will, while the extraction itself, or declaration in Scotus words, is carried out in accordance with one’s efficient power of declaration: “that which produces actual knowledge and gives it that power of declaring can be said ‘declaring by this knowledge’ efficiently.”28 It can be said that in the third type of memory efficient and final causality form an autonomous cocausality where the latter governs the former inferior cause. It is important to note, as Scotus does, that the object of the act of intellection or recollection is not the “final cause because the object, being primarily what the act is about, is not the thing for the love of which the act is elicited.”29 In fact, efficient causality is present both when a memory is formed or extracted by a willing power, and when a “memory” or a state of affairs is induced in something accidentally, or quasi-accidentally (when that act can be traced to be a result of a volition of an agent, e.g., by God). As Scotus rejects pure accidental causality as mere chance,30 it follows that either efficient causality is executed directly or indirectly. In this respect efficient causality is indifferent to the question of “who” uses it. Just as the neural physical activity of our brain is incapable of explaining the act of thinking itself, so efficient causality cannot explain the outcome of that which it moves. When one thinks of causality as part of a remembering act, one can leap from the mechanistic perspective that views causality as a blind deterministic process that is limited to its quantified measures, to a cosmological understanding that views the causal processes as a joint elicitation of meaningful information and “memories.” This analogy between the neural activity of the brain and the act of thinking, and efficient to final causality, offers us an insight into the way final causality causes or directs efficient causality, or more exactly, an insight about where not to look in our attempt to explain how final causality causes. When one examines scans of brain activity one will only find traces of neural activity. One will not find traces of thought. This is a plain consequence of the fact that the sensors used to detect physical activity are affected only by efficient causality, i.e., if a neuron is fired a corresponding pixel shines on the screen. Sensors do not light-up intents (though sophisticated AI meta-analysis can deduce an intent—but such an analysis is not based only on the measurements). Measuring becomes trustworthy if it accurately measures that which is being measured, and the most accurate sensors are those which report 0 percent false negatives or false positives, i.e., they act as if in accordance with necessity. But final causality does not follow necessity but rather contingency and for this reason its causality is called metaphorical:

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[T]he end moves the will metaphorically, but not necessarily. That “what moves effectively, however, moves necessarily,” is true in regard to natural things where [an involuntary] efficient cause does the moving, and in this case the end has to move in a metaphorical sense. But in a potency that is free, namely the will, the end only moves the efficient cause contingently. Therefore, the end moves it only contingently and metaphorically.31

It is not that final causality cannot be depicted because it does not exist. Rather, a measurement, by definition, is required for it to be a well-determined quantified effect. Measurements measure the traces of efficient causality, its past doings, and are incapable of representing or “measuring” final causality’s “metaphorical” determination of future open possibilities. As no measurement based on efficient causality can testify that final causality directs reality, one must trust one’s own experience. This offers an interesting reading into the nature of becoming. Being and Becoming are at the core of philosophical thinking. The history of philosophy can generally be summed up as a continuous dialectics aimed to reconcile Parmenides’s immutable Being and Heraclitus’s continuous Becoming. Alas, all sophisticated attempts cannot eradicate the non-compatibility of Being and Becoming. The traditional understanding of becoming presupposes a transition of generation and corruption, that involves the annihilation of something in the process of becoming something else. This means that becoming involves a nothing becoming something and a something becoming nothing. But Parmenides, as every first-year philosophy student learns, emphasized that nothing does not exist and that being is immutable and eternal. This fact, that the nothingness within becoming contradicts being, never delayed the development of philosophy, which reached its zenith in Hegel’s Science of Logic and remained dominant in Heidegger’s thought. Taking the Scotistic vision seriously allows us to reconstruct a notion of becoming in a manner that does not presuppose a nothingness. Becoming, as it is understood as a process of generation and corruption, is governed by efficient causality that transforms the things from one thing into another. This is what one can call a processual becoming that is physical in its orientation and is concerned with the physical alteration of things. By focusing on the physical process, which is geometrical, it perceives becoming as a continuous mechanistic process. Scotus’s perspective is not physical but rather logical-metaphysical. The process of becoming cannot be explained simply as a sort of propulsion from the past. In anchoring becoming simply in a prior propulsion, one states he has no explanation for the question why becoming. Becoming must answer to the why that initiated it, and in this respect Scotus’s simple answer is that

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becoming exists because it fulfills a desired end. The end is prior, insofar as it is desired and willed by the initiator of the becoming. This initial desiring also presupposes that all the possible stages of the process of becoming are thinkable or possible objects for consideration. This logical-metaphysical consideration of becoming is concerned not with the continuous physical transformation but rather with the discrete leap from a present state to an alternative one among different possible futures. This is a discrete process whereby one logical setting is replaced by another. The following example will clarify the difference. When one looks, for example, at a dog running, one understands the running of the dog as a process where the atoms of the dog are actually moving from one place to another. However, when one sees a movie on television of a running dog, one does not suppose that the pixels themselves are actually moving but rather that a sort of algorithm tells the screen which pixels to light up with which colors at any given time. This discrete presentation on the television screen does not mean the running has no unity. Whereas the actual running attains its unity from the physical alterations and laws that govern the body, the unity of the dog on the screen is governed by final causality that is executed by a sort of mathematical function that orders the movements of the pixels in a manner that turns the light sequences into a function with meaning. Whereas physical reality can speak of a transformation from something that is now more or less than it was, the television screen and the sequence presented do not consider an unlighted pixel, i.e., a black light, as less real or actual than a lighted one. Insofar as the pixels serve the greater unity they were designed to represent, they contribute to the unity of the represented thing. Similarly, the Scotistic process of becoming, whereby reality is changed from one possibility to another, forms a meaningful sequence of becoming to a desired destination. Whereas the physical process considers alteration as something that involves nothingness, the Scotistic becoming is like a musical movement where the sequence of notes forms a musical sentence. Though the act of playing music requires the pianist to cease playing a specific sound as he moves forward to press the following key, from a logical perspective the former note is not eliminated by the one following it. On the contrary, the new note is meaningless if it is not considered together with the former one. Under the Scotistic vision the processual becoming, that is governed by efficient causality, is subjugated to the logical becoming that is governed by final causality. The nothingness that is involved with the processual becoming does not transcend into the metaphysical realm but only expresses the lack of ability of the geometrical physical explanation to translate and explain by geometrical-mechanical means the meaningful movement from one note to another.

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Information technology gradually awakens the environment around us, turns the silent objects into communicating beings that are attuned to our needs and desires. In reconsidering our will, the physical governance of reality is masked and attired in our own image. However, the return to final causality does not set the clock back to pre-modern times. There is a significant difference between the two conceptions of final causalities. The ancient conception of final causality was drawn from how Man thinks and interprets reality, in which things themselves did not comply with our will. Thus, in attempting to make sense of reality, Man was forced to postulate a greater rotator that organizes reality. In marginalizing final causality, mechanical philosophy kept the image of the greater rotator, yet diminished the non-mathematical aspects in favorite of those that can be measured and quantified. Information technology reverses the image altogether. The computer revolution offered man the ability to extend his grasp and command of reality, forcing reality to revolve man’s needs and will to power. Whereas pre-modern final causality was an interpretation of reality from the point of view of eternity, technological final causality is humancentric through and through. Gaining the ability to govern reality indeed allows us to shape it in our own image, but the image is ours to determine. Will it be dictated by our needs or perhaps values? Even more profoundly, will our animalistic constitution govern it, or perhaps that which makes us persons? As we have seen, choosing can be understood as an act that adds information. But the mere fact that we are driven to choose is not trivial. It presupposes that we are immersed in reality, care about and respond to our surroundings, and pose goals perceived as worth pursuing. Alternatively, we take a stand to prevent undesired outcomes. Caring, responsibility, investment in the world, and the improvement of ourselves are essential for us to bring about the future not through necessity but by following the path of freedom. Objective addition of information cannot be understood without appreciating the role of freedom for the constitution of personhood.

Chapter 9‌‌‌

Rethinking Personhood

A common opinion holds that Scotus emphasized the pure mathematical aspect of reality that transcends any specific actualization in this or that world. This view sees this or that accidental world that we see in front of us becoming relatively insignificant—simply an accidental manifestation which is of little interest. Such a reading is directed by exalting Scotus’s mathematical-transcendental way of thinking—favoring the absolute over the accidental. However, if one were to ground his thinking in one’s conception of personhood, one might reach the opposite conclusion. The notion of person has a long history dating from the time it was first adapted from the Greek term prosopon, later to be translated into the Latin persona and, since then, has enjoyed a rich and long-lived career within Western thinking. In fact, whereas central Latin philosophical concepts such as substance either lost their metaphysical role and are used metaphorically, or are reserved for specialists, the notion of person and personhood has become central to the way we think of ourselves. And yet, despite the centrality of the notion of personhood, its meaning is overall obscure and it is not clear what it is about this notion that is so important that it justifies its long endurance in Western thinking. On the one hand, the general usage of the term is somewhat similar to terms such as self, I/ego, etc., while, on the other hand, the definition or explanations of what makes something a person only marginally advances our understanding of what distinguishes this notion from its synonyms. The famous sociologist and anthropologist Marcel Mauss wrote in his classic study on the notion of the person that “[e]ven today it [the notion of the person] is still imprecise, delicate and fragile, one requiring further elaboration. This is the idea of ‘person’ (personne), the idea of ‘self’ (moi).”1 Here, even in his call for an elaboration of the notion of the person, we witness his manifest difficulty in distinguishing between the self and the person. Following key pre-modern developments within the history of the notion of personhood, the chapter will present its own constructive argument to the 121

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question what it is to be a person. It will be argued that the person should be understood as the meeting of the “soul” (or the “self” or the “ego,” etc.) and what will be referred to as the body-world-history, i.e., the elements in which the “person” as manifest and bodily extended in “the world” and “history,” and which determine the person’s existential standing. The dynamic conception of personhood that is presented is not simply the result of an historical clarification. It is a philosophical attempt to offer a notion of personhood to think of the self not as an abstract “I” with all its attributes but rather concretely, as a someone. In other words, this transcendental examination aims to understand how createdhood shapes our personhood. The original meaning of the notion of person and personhood has no essential ties to ontology or to theology (yet it is indirectly linked). As with many other notions, person and personhood originated from ordinary things and their usage. John Zizioulas explains that the original Greek meaning of prosopon, later to be translated to Latin as persona, had no ontological meaning and simply referred to a mask. Originally, he explains, it specifically meant the part of the head “below the cranium.” And yet it is not the mask which is of interest in itself but rather the assumption of the dramatic role that accompanies the usage of the mask in the theater after which the existential struggle takes place: “It is precisely in the theater that man strives to become a ‘person,’ to rise up against this harmonious unity which oppresses him as rational and moral necessity.” The theater teaches the audience two opposing lessons: on the one hand, the spectator learns that one cannot escape one’s fate nor show hubris without retribution. There he is taught that the world was not created for him but rather that man was created for the world: “His freedom is circumscribed, or rather there is no freedom for him . . . and consequently his ‘person’ is nothing but a ‘mask,’ something which has no bearing on his true ‘hypostasis,’ something without ontological content.” At the same time a contradictory notion is taught: “a result of this mask, man—the actor, but properly also the spectator—has acquired a certain taste of freedom, a certain specific ‘hypostasis,’ a certain identity, which the rational and moral harmony of the world in which he lives denies him.”2 The spectator is thus taught two opposing lessons, one about dependence and necessity, and one about independence and freedom. In trying to make sense of our existence, we are torn between the truths of these two images of existence. As happens from time to time in the development of ideas, the emergence of Christianity and theological-ontological needs forced the Church Fathers to assign new and decisive meaning to existing notions, in our case to person and personhood. Though the first usage of person was made in the Latin West by the Church Father Tertullian (“una substantia, tres personae”),3 the theological endeavor of explaining how the Father, the Son, and the Spirit are One God, was carried out by the Greek Fathers who welded new ontological

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meaning into the notion of person by identifying it with the substantive term of hypostasis. Zizioulas explained that this alteration carried with it two significant ontological revolutions: 1. The person is no longer considered to be an addition to being but rather is the hypostasis of the being, i.e., its manifestation. 2. Entities or beings do not trace themselves to being but rather to their person, that which “enables entities to be entities,”4 as the substance does not exist stripped bare of its modes of existence, its hypostasis.5 Augustine was the first to speak of person as a relation in order to avoid Arianism that held that the Son is less than the Father and that they are essentially different. Understanding persons as relations permits a non-accidental differentiation that does not imply difference in their common essence.6 Augustine wrote: [I]n God nothing is said to be according to accident, because in Him nothing is changeable; and yet everything that is said, is not said, according to substance. For it is said in relation to something, as the Father in relation to the Son and the Son in relation to the Father, which is not accident; because both the one is always Father, and the other is always Son.7

This relational understanding of the divine persons had a significant impact on the social nature8 rooted within the concept of personhood, and this opened a new non-Aristotelian way to understand subsistence, in what later was called subsistent relations. O’Connor explains: For to be a substance in the Aristotelian sense is to be logically independent. The relational view of the person means that in addition to being causally dependent upon others for one’s existence as a person, one is also logically dependent upon others. This clears the way for social roles, which are relational because they imply interaction, to become essential attributes.9

This new social-ontological understanding of the personhood of the Trinity generates a new way to understand existence, not as something which is based on that which underlies the thing, but rather on the relational act which is self-generating. This is, of course, an abstraction of the theological idea that Joseph Ratzinger articulated so well: “the first person does not generate in the sense that the act of generating a Son is added to the already complete person, but the person is the deed of generating, of giving itself, of streaming itself forth. The person is identical with this act of self-donation.”10 Opposing Sabellianism that held that the divine persons are not really distinct but only logically so, Aquinas followed Augustine and formulated in Aristotelian terms the idea that the persons are subsistent relations that are really distinct.11 Aquinas explained that “the name ‘person’ signifies relation

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directly, and the essence indirectly; not, however, the relation as such, but as expressed by way of a hypostasis.”12 Boethius was the first to define the person philosophically: Persona individua substantia rationalis naturae est—i.e., a person is an individual substance of a rational nature.13 This definition initiated a long historical development to which subsequent philosophers return again and again. Andrew Arlig explained that a person is not only a substance which subsists but one which substands, that is, stands in opposition to. The person, he continued, carries its accidents as part of its standing, and by so doing they become an “integrated unity.”14 This definition, though powerful, feels as though it is lacking an essential element of what we understand when we use the word person. The conjunction of substantive individuation together with rationality seems to be too abstract and omits the added value of what makes someone not just an individual, but rather a someone. It should be noticed that the notion of individuality is negative and designates the fact that an individual cannot be divided. But this designation does not imply anything positive about that which cannot be divided. William of St. Thierry expressed a transformation of the sensitivities according to which the notion of personhood was understood, moving from focusing on the substanding rational nature of the inner life of the subject. William argued that a person has an innate responsibility toward the other that constitutes an “inner subjective personal structure.” Thus he defined the human person as a subsistent intellectual having a spiritual existence that grants him the ability “to relate to the totality of being.”15 Richard of St. Victor’s modification of Boethius’s definition made a substantial contribution to the development of the notion of personhood.16 Distinguishing between a designation of the particular person as a someone, and a designation of the substance as a something,17 Richard redefined person as spiritualis naturae incommunicabilis existential: the incommunicable existence of spiritual nature.18 Putting his finger on the fact that personhood is grounded in an incommunicable element affirms the fact that personhood is fundamentally about that element within the I or self which cannot be given or transmitted to someone else. This lays the foundation both for our autonomous existing and for the opaqueness of the self to others, i.e., why we cannot truly touch other people’s selves. Duns Scotus explained that Richard’s correction was required, for otherwise it would follow that the divine essence, that is communicable, would be a person.19 Joseph Ratzinger noted that this “definition correctly sees that in its theological meaning ‘person’ does not lie on the level of essence, but of existence,”20 for “[w]hat is a human, in fact, if not a rational animal subjected to death?”21 To be a person is first and foremost about existence, i.e., about what it means for a thinking creature to exist concretely.

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Whereas Boethius’s definition of the person as an individual substance of a rational nature neglected to consider the unique existential element within us which makes us us, Richard’s correction powerfully injects it into the person’s core. However, it is not clear how it is possible to bridge between the two. One can understand the views of subsequent thinkers such as Aquinas and Scotus as attempts to answer this question. Aquinas followed Boethius’s definition: “person is the special name of an individual of rational nature.”22 Further he added that “person is that which is most perfect in all of nature.”23 Aquinas tied the substantiality and individuality of the person to Richard’s incommunicability: And since under an individual substance of rational nature is contained the substance, individual, i.e., incommunicable and distinct from others, whether of God, of man or of angels, it follows that a divine Person must signify something subsistent and distinct in the divine nature, just as a human person signifies something subsistent and distinct in human nature: and this is the formal signification of a person whether divine or human.24

Following the previous discussion of the divine persons as subsistent relations, immaterial things are individualized by themselves due to their selfsubsistence:25 “since all that is absolute is common and undivided,” “the only thing that is distinct and incommunicable in the divine nature is relation.”26 This is not the case with material creatures whose Thomistic principle of individuation is grounded in matter. It thus seems that there is a discrepancy between the incommunicable element that individualizes immaterial persons, subsistent relations, and the individual element that individualizes material persons—matter—that is not a relation. Duns Scotus understood the person to be the ultimate existence. His definition follows Richard’s modification of Boethius formulation of the person: “Person signifies incommunicability that exists that has an intellectual nature.”27 However, in a common Scotistic manner, he modified and qualified incommunicability. Claiming that the divine essence is both singular and communicable, Scotus redefined the notion of incommunicability not in terms of individuality but rather in terms of dependence and independence.28 In attempting to define the principal that grounds personhood Scotus writes: [C]reated personality is not something positive; for in addition to singularity we find no positive entity that renders the singular nature incommunicable. All that is added to singularity is the negation of dependence or incommunicability, the denial that it is given over to someone.29

Scotus rejected the following two poles: 1. that personhood is defined by a positive entity added to a thing’s individuality, arguing that only God has such

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intrinsic incommunicable nature due to its infiniteness.30 Being a person does not involve an ontological difference but rather a perfection of existence31; 2. that “what formally completes the notion of person is merely the negation of its dependence upon some extrinsic person, for . . . the soul apart from its body would be a person.”32 However, Scotus did not completely reject this latter position but accepted its qualification as a negation or denial of what he termed aptitudinal or dispositional dependence (as opposed to actual dependence) “that completes the notion of personhood . . . in created nature.” Nico den Bok et al. explained that this aptitudinal dependence “is a contingent independence, an actual state of affairs which can be different, but is as it is because of a decision of the divine will. . . . In divine personhood, which is also defined by the denial of actual and dispositional dependence, this independence is non-contingent.”33 In addition to personhood that is achieved through negation to aptitudinal dependence, Scotus held that one can attain one’s personhood through perfect obedience to the divine: “it becomes a person by that personality upon which it depends.”34 Thus we can see that personhood is an expression of an active act of the will, of a strive to overcome limitation, either positively as concession or obedience, or negatively as rejection and refusal. Scotus thus colors the individuality of the person with the relational dynamics of dependence and independence, which is not something which is added to the thing but is rather a relational negation of its dependence.35 Personhood belongs to one who strives to be, more, less, or the same, so long as one strives. This alteration allows us to untangle the problem we have seen with Thomas, who saw matter as that which grounds a human’s personhood. Perceiving incommunicability according to independence and not individuality allows us to conceive the relation between the soul and the body not as a relation that forms individuality but rather as a relation that forms one’s in/ dependence. Personhood does not express simply one’s independence but it rather emerges out of the constant struggle between dependence and independence—it is essentially relative and expressed from within existence. The constitution of man in matter, and the separation of the soul from the body after death provide us with a new triad to grapple with the classical dualistic body-soul distinction: the body-person-soul triad. This triad not only mediates between the body and the soul but also casts new light on what it means to exist as a self in a world. Aquinas explains that the definition of person does not apply to the rational soul. According to the common interpretation of Aquinas,36 the separated souls are no longer what they used to be; they are diminished selves, or we might say that they are no longer persons and are deprived of their personhood: “The separated soul is a part of rational nature and not a whole rational human nature: wherefore it is not a person.”37 This essential part of the self

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that remains after death, and which existed before conception is not the self but rather a diminished self. At the end of days, so the Thomistic view asserts, the separated and diminished souls will assume new bodies and will become persons once more. When we speak of fully perfect selves that stand on their own or persons, we do not speak of the soul as it stands in itself—alone and eternal—but rather as it is incarnated into a temporal contingent and historical body and world. Augustine termed this incarnation the “personal unity.”38 Aquinas maintained that the human soul essentially requires a body. While in the Sentences and de Veritate “Aquinas held that it is within the natural capacities of a human soul to think without sensory images,” in the mature Summa, Aquinas changed his position, holding that “the only natural mode of existing for a human soul is for it to be united to the body. Correspondingly, the only natural mode of thinking for a human soul is through sensory images.”39 The separation of the soul after death, puts the soul in a crippled state for it loses that by which it attains knowledge of the world. Instead, the separated soul receives infused knowledge from superior substances that allow it to understand without phantasms. The common reading emphasizes the cognitive downgrading of this separated state: “an influx of this sort will not produce knowledge as perfect and as directly related to singulars as the knowledge which we acquire here below through the senses.”40 Scotus concurred with Aquinas that the separated soul is not a person as it does not meet the requirements for being incommunicable. He explained that while the divine persons are essentially incommunicable, the incommunicability of created persons is accidental.41 The notion of in/communicability is used in two senses—according to identity, as when a universal is communicated to a singular, and according to informing, as when a form is communicated to matter.42 Scotus noted that a person is incommunicable in both these respects. Thus he concluded as the separated soul does not have the second, it is not a person.43 Scotus’s examination of memory offers us another cognitive avenue to reflect on the deprived state of the separated souls. As we recall, Scotus explained that there are three ways to understand memory. The first type of memory functions as the conserver of past events as they have occurred. The second type of memory maintains the species or forms as standing alone and for themselves. The third type of memory, elicits actual knowledge. Making use of the second type of memory, the separated soul can indeed state “cogito ergo sum,” but lacking the first type of memory, no diachronic identity will allow it to grasp who it is, who it was. In many respects the cogito argument seems to bring together Boethius’s and Richard’s conceptions of personhood. Descartes’s proof is anchored in our incommunicable and intuitive grasp of our own individual rational nature. But this radical skepticism and reliance on incommunicable firstperson

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knowledge, facilitates a very narrow conception of personhood: Nothing additional can substantially be attributed to the ego, and as opposed to the body-person-soul triad, the person does not function as an intermediary between the body and the soul. Either it falls under thinking attributes or under categories of space. There is nothing in between. Furthermore, Descartes’s distinction between the realm of extension and the realm of thought is famous for holding that these realms are by essence alien to one another: No spatial attributes are to be found in thought, as no traces of thought can be located in the extended world. However, one thing is common to both: communicability. Spatial attributes are communicable within the realm of extension as attributes of thought are communicable within the soul. Thus, while Descartes’s cogito argument relies on incommunicable knowledge, anything else he says about thinking is communicable. It seems therefore that the separated soul is better suited to the Cartesian self than a genuine living person, for as we have seen, the separated soul can also perform the cogito argument. Something similar can be said about Kant’s distinction between transcendental and empirical ego. Though this distinction expresses an understanding that there is a fundamental difference between the transcendental ego and the empirical worldly ego, this merely emphasizes the difficulty of understanding in what sense the essential transcendental self is, in fact, truly related to the world. Furthermore this lack of ability to bridge the transcendental and empirical realms seems to press us to choose whether personhood is grounded in the transcendental or empirical egos. Choosing the former leaves us with very little that distinguishes personhood from the “I.” Choosing the latter turns the person into an empirical mask that has nothing essential to do with our “I.” It can thus be said that if personhood belongs to the transcendental prong, then subjective elements are excluded, but if it belongs to the empirical prong then it follows that the person adds “nothing essential.” Kant’s Categorical Imperative, that states that one has to “[a]ct only according to that maxim whereby you can, at the same time, will that it should become a universal law,”44 demands that one not act as a law-giver but rather as a lawtransmitter, i.e., one should limit one’s own personality to the minimum; it should only be the vessel of a supreme good. As we have seen with Scotus, personhood is an expression of an active act of the will, either positively as concession or obedience, or negatively as rejection and refusal. Whereas Scotus incorporated the former alternative for personhood that made it possible to include God’s servants, Kant’s categorical imperative fits the servants of the Universal Good. Whereas the dualistic understanding divides the world into the mind-soul which is essential and the physical-historical which is contingent and inessential, the person is neither this nor that but an incarnation of both: an essential,

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unique, and contingent expression of its existence as a rational and individual creature in its world. Following our discussion of place in chapter 3, the localization and concretization of the “separated” soul as a person in a body-world-history can be understood as a specific case of the manner in which things take place and manifest generally, i.e., a person is a thinking and willing creature who dynamically operates in the world. As one might have noticed, Scotus discussion of place does not speak of matter or material beings and is designed to be applied to both material entities as well as immaterial ones. The latter he applies in his discussion of the angels, i.e., in what sense immaterial thinking beings occupy a place, but can also be used to explain in what sense our thought virtually occupies a place, or in more contemporary discussion, by using technological devices and the internet, in what sense we are present in the world and to one another. As we have seen, Scotus formulates five relationships within Aristotle’s conception of place. The first four relations treat the body as a quantum whereas the fifth relates to it as a natural entity. Returning to Scotus’s reformulation of incommunicability in terms of in/dependence rather than individuality, we notice that the latter, that designates that which cannot be divided, is essentially mathematical and can be grounded in the first mathematical elements that transcend existence, whereas in/dependence belongs to the fifth, which is concerned with this existing world. In chapter 3 we examined Scotus’s distinction between the substantive quantity, the quantitas materiae, and the accidental quantity. Whereas Scotus’s quantitas materiae speaks in physical terms and is pictured as a balloon that shrinks and expands, one can imagine non-physical balloons that represent different dynamics of the person’s existence in the world, and its respective in/dependencies. Just as the face of the balloon’s surface is defined by the equilibrium between the internal forces of the balloon that push outward and the external aptitudinal forces that push inward, so one can think of the person not as subjugated only to physical reality but also to economic and sociological ones. Whereas the image of the physical balloon is simplistic, the economic and sociological dynamics of existence subject the person to a far more complicated set of dependencies wherein it strives to define its independencies. This dynamic interaction, whereby the different persons expand and shrink, constitutes their personal or sociological relationships. Personification can thus be thought as a localization of the absolute features of the soul into a specific world-history setting and its “laws.” As the concretization of matter manifests the dynamics and the equilibrium between an entity’s inner absolute quantity of matter and the external natural and contingent forces, so the person is not merely an actualization of a stand-alone soul but rather the result of the dependence-independence constant struggle between the inner

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soul and the specific external world and its history, into which it is thrust. In contrast to the promise to escape our limitedness, the conception of personhood as a materialization of the soul does not attempt to transcend our limited “crippled” existence but rather to embrace it. In so doing the person embraces his world and his history. This actualization is not similar to the typical Aristotelian distinction between potency and actuality that holds that all existing flowers are more or less perfect actualizations of preconceived potentialities of the same form. The actualization of the person is not a particular instantiation of a form but rather a unique and incommunicable manifestation that expresses the truth of the existence of the self as embodied in a specific body, in a specific world, and in a specific history. It is from here that the person emerges as a someone who has a world. By masking the mask of the prosopon, though utterly contingent, the person expresses its truth as limited finite creature. The person is not simply the meeting of the soul with the body-world-history, i.e., the elements by which the “person” manifest and is embodied in the world and in history. This meeting is based on a dynamic of negation, a negation that is a manifestation of the soul’s constant resistance to the determinations of the body-world-history, which continuously forces it to succumb. In this respect one can speak of authenticity or inauthenticity insofar as one’s personhood is determined internally by one’s will, or externally, by circumstances or other wills that subjugate it. As opposed to the common understanding of the mask as something that camouflages, the masking of the person reveals the truth or untruth of the person and constitutes the self as a hybrid hypostasis which is at the same time both transcendental and dynamically related to the world and its history. As the negation precedes the affirmation, the truth of the person precedes its constitution. And yet, as the person is incommunicable, one can never find someone’s “I” in the world but only its negations to the subjugation of the world that can be discerned a posteriori as its vestiges in the world. Just as a regular mask simultaneously hides and reveals, so also the mask of the person hides and reveals the person, but with an essential difference: Whereas under the regular mask lies the real person, nothing lies under the prosopon mask—and it is for this reason that one should not use Cartesian notions such as transparency when speaking of the truth of the self. The truth of the self is not something abstract but rather something manifested in reality. The prosopon mask is the genuine manifestation of the self in the world, whether authentic or inauthentic. Being authentic or inauthentic does not refer to whether it is dependent or independent, for one is always both dependent and independent—a fundamental tension within our existence— but rather to whether one’s will is determined willingly or not.

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By negating the body-world-history the person affirms and reveals its standing and place in the world, its truth. When one considers the person abstractly, there is little sense that one is speaking of applying ethics to it, except in a transcendental manner,45 for the “person” has no memory/history and does not belong to or relate to a world. There is no sense of asking how such a person should act. By relating to the world, the person becomes subjected to ethical considerations. For by negating and resisting the external forces that continuously define what it is, the person affirms who he is, what he stands for. By so doing the person manifests its standing in the world and through which ethical relations to the world and other persons are prescribed. Ethics is thus concerned with persons who are in the world—not with abstract ends nor with diminished souls. In recent years, several studies have examined the notion of disability in Christian medieval thought, chief among them are those of Richard Cross.46 A common conception of disability, as exemplified in Aquinas, views it as a punishment for the original sin or as a direct punishment for one’s wrongdoings. Scotus’s transcendental reasoning leads him to conclude that there is no essential relationship between sin and disability, arguing that disability could have taken place in a world even if no sin occurred. The punitive element becomes accidental to the question of disability. It is naturalized and analyzed within transcendental reasoning concerning creaturehood and the modes of existence in different possible worlds.47 Cross distinguishes between impairment and disability, explaining that “impairment is dependence; disability is the failure of the environment—be it the physical environment or the activities of other human agents—to provide the conditions for provide [sic] for opportunities for dependence necessary for flourishing.”48 It is not the place to open a new discussion about disability or impairment and the different semantics scholars use. Instead, I wish to point out the link between personhood and disability or impairment: dependency. From a transcendental perspective, being a creature bespeaks first and foremost an essential dependency and limitation that defines our basic structure of beingness. This does not mean that we are flawed but that our limitedness and dependency define our mode of existence and relations to other entities. Ontologically speaking, our impairments cast our dependencies into the world. It is the world and other creatures, along with their impairments, that we encounter and with whom we need to cope. To exist is to exist as impaired alongside other impaired creatures. Nevertheless, this does not mean one cannot flourish and attain happiness. Perceiving creatures’ existence as impaired allows us to perceive other’s existential challenges empathically. On the other hand, it localizes our scope of action. As dependent, limited beings, one cannot act everywhere. Our task as a community of impaired creatures is to care for and to help each other to overcome limitations and dependencies. In

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attempting to overcome our dependencies, even if only in a qualified way, we need to cooperate with our peers not simply out of interest but out of empathy, friendship and love.

Whereas animals are limited by their naturally ordained powers, man uses technology to break away from the limitations imposed by nature. As technology serves our deepest desire to escape our creaturehoodness, it should not be understood only materially, for material technology is designed inside the mental and social frameworks within which it is implemented. Philosophical ideas and literature shape how we understand reality and ourselves, political and juridical systems supply us with tools to arrange society and govern it, and so forth. They are all technologies by which we interact and expand, offering us means to increase and alter our independence–dependence relations. What is unique about information technology is the affinity between the technical material howness by which it operates, and its effect on the manner we perceive and understand. The classical body-mind distinction is basically transcended by allowing our desires to reach their objects immediately. The world and its objects no longer stand in opposition to our mind, they are awakened, ready to serve our needs as if they are our extensions. This immediacy is a technological illusion that is based on a selective representation of “reality” that situates us in a specific commercial network that supplies our demand, and in specific discourses and with “friends” who influence our desires. Information technology seamlessly wraps its users in imaginary worlds and imposes upon them dependence–independence relations that suit its business model, offering them the option to purchase “prime” subscriptions that upgrade their ability to execute their will. This is of course an illusion, not in respect to the material aspect of technology, but rather to its non-material promise. Technology’s attempt to break away is not an absolute breaking away but a limited one. Through technology, man moves faster, gains more power, and lives longer. But Man can never truly escape these limitations. Despite the continuous efforts to break away from the limitations of bodily existence, new limitations replace them. This only emphasizes the futility of trying to break away from our finite constitution. Technology, as the manifestation of Man’s desperate will to escape his creaturehoodness, dissociates man from his surroundings, planting false expectations about its ability to rescue him from his fate. In so doing, man forgets his place, cultivates his arrogance toward the world and others, and finally is prevented from confronting and accepting his actual position.

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This results in alienation from man’s natural place on the one hand, and finally produces existential distress, due to technology’s inability to rescue us from our fate. The relentless penetration of technology into our lives, whether by taking over our channels of knowledge and communication, or by making us redundant in the job market, substantially cripples the dependence-independence dialectics within which we situate ourselves in society. This might throw an endless number of people into a state of utter despair and dependence, devoid of any ability to determine their lives, ultimately dispossessing them of their personhoodness.

Epilogue‌‌‌

At the end of my first academic year at the philosophy department, a special event was held. During the evening, a rising faculty member argued that the historical branches of philosophy do not belong to philosophy but rather to history and thus should be relocated. His proposal, in fact, resonated with broader academic trends. As the older generation of faculty members specializing in the history of philosophy retired, their positions were assumed by scholars from other philosophical fields. Thus, the question of which department the historians of philosophy belong to, became, from a practical point of view, a non-issue, for historians of philosophy were, in effect, rendered orphans. The department’s “sensitive” solution regarding the fate of historians of philosophy speaks mainly of a current inability to distinguish between historians and historians of philosophy, and the difficulty of providing a rationale for why the field of “history of philosophy” belongs to philosophy and not to history. Traditionally, however, the history of philosophy was regarded as intrinsic to philosophical inquiry. As the late S. H. Bergman noted in his magisterial monograph on the history of philosophy: The role of history in philosophy is utterly different than in other sciences. In sciences, history is used as a sort of a junkyard; the aim of doing history there is part of a process of putting aside—of overcoming—theories that have been proven incorrect and have become “historical”. . . . Not so the history of philosophy. The ancient theories do not become “historical” due to their rejection, and there is no organic accumulation of new knowledge to old ones that have stood the test; rather, from time to time, the whole face of philosophy changes. Instead of one method comes a second and a third; however, in so doing, the former method does not become “historical” as with the sciences, but rather remains alive as a whole, and even though it was rejected for an hour, and it is said that its time has passed, it awaits for its revival. And in any case, the conversation with the historical philosophical methods does not cease, and in so doing, their vitality is revealed.1

The objective of historians is to study the past. Through an accumulation of historical evidence, they endeavor to reconstruct the past and offer 135

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explanations for the processes that governed its development. Their historical perspective places them in a unique position to compare and understand a wide array of phenomena, such as politics, warfare, economics, intellectual and cultural traditions, etc. Their research discloses the complex relations between the many facets of human existence and the society within which we live, providing us with an enhanced ability to judge and to face the challenges of our times. That said, the kind of wisdom that history offers is of a practical nature. Through historical reconstruction and critical thinking about the past, we broaden the scope of learning from experience. This is not the case, however, when one speaks of the history of philosophy. Past philosophies do not offer themselves as experiences to learn from. Historical understanding is vital as we try to understand the intellectual environment within which they developed and why a specific issue stands at the focal point of a specific philosophy at a particular point in time. But good philosophy transcends its historical cradle and can converse with past and future philosophies on an equal footing, offering a unique key to address a set of philosophical issues. And yet, the burden of history weighs heavily on the shoulder of all philosophies. In attempting to understand a philosophical system, one must acquire the hermeneutical horizon to decipher it correctly. Like acquiring a language, the task is simpler when one resides within a community of speakers. It becomes more and more difficult as the living vessels of the language become “historical.” The semantic and conceptual inflections of a given discourse, that are immediately understood by the community of speakers, become obscure, and demand a careful investigation by outsiders to that community. In doing so, historical aspects of language are deciphered, offering us an understanding of how language functions and a better historical understanding of its development. Contemporary philosophies are pursued by given communities who share their language and conceptual presuppositions. These communities are composed of its acting philosophers and the broader intellectual and academic discourses in which they reside and the issues they confront (scientific, political, cultural, normative, and so forth). These living discourses offer their participants relatively easy hermeneutical access. In contrast, the communities that sustained past philosophies are long gone. The way historians of philosophy gain access to their subjects of the past demands a careful reconstruction through which the meaning of the text is deciphered. To that end, one has to become acquainted with the discourse and the relevant historical context, terminologies, values, and challenges faced by that period, allowing the historian of philosophy to understand both the text’s literal meaning and the fundamental philosophical needs that guided its composition.

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The complexity and unique religious mindset of the medieval era and its distinctive “historical” Sitz im Leben directly affected the perceptions of medieval philosophy. They may be perceived as obscure, for those who are not prejudiced against them, or as nonsense, for those who are. The attempt to span medieval philosophy and the challenges the information revolution lays at our doorstep is no small challenge. There is undoubtedly a need to extricate medieval philosophy from its historical context and terminology in order to highlight its abiding value for contemporary philosophical reflection. But even more fundamentally, a genuine and vigorous philosophical confrontation with the emerging information revolution and the way it alters the basic categories through which we perceive and understand reality is currently lacking as a cogent philosophical project. This does not mean it has been neglected altogether. It looms large in popular culture, as is attested by films and TV series such as Odyssey: A Space 2001, The Matrix, Black Mirror, Westworld, and many others. Is there a decisive argument why medieval philosophy, specifically that of Scotus, is the most suitable philosophy to approach the information age? The short answer is no. If there were a simple answer, philosophy departments would have received much more funding to hire historians of philosophy to offer clear solutions. The reason it is not that simple is the emerging nature of our object of inquiry. We only have bits and pieces of an understanding of the emerging future. These bits and pieces are discussed extensively in newspaper articles or books, usually written by an entrenched member of the elite information club. However, the implications of the information revolution still lie ahead of us, leaving us with a vague understanding of the new subjectivity that will emerge from it. This, in my view, should not hold us back. As opposed to historians who try to understand the past, philosophers’ role is to think about the future, name it, and offer the conceptual framework to bring it about. Historians of philosophy, conducting an ongoing dialogue with past philosophies and their historical dialectics, are the best equipped to decipher the essence of the coming future and to frame it. ‘Family resemblance’ is a famous term Wittgenstein used to substitute the use of essence to explain how different things are said to belong to something, e.g., a game. Instead of participating in a common essence, they are connected to one another by overlapping similarities. This term effectively describes the work of the historians. By comparing historical events, they do not hold them to be similar, but rather excavate and disclose the overlapping similarities that allow for a fruitful comparison of the different dynamics that governed them. Conducting a dialogue between the thought of Scotus and the need to formulate a metaphysics for the information age is thus based on affinities, sorts of family resemblances, that make such a comparison an interesting exercise, and, it is to be hoped, insightful. To name but a few, as I have argued at the

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beginning of this paper, medieval philosophy categories of thought match better than the modern categories to confront a wide array of phenomena produced by the information revolution. Scotus is a key transitional figure in the process of transforming medieval philosophy into the modern mathematical one, and his thought offers itself better to modern philosophical problems and can more easily adapt itself to present “medieval solutions.” Finally, Scotus systematically changed the focal point of philosophy, transcending from the concrete reality to a transcendental philosophical investigation of the logic of possible worlds insofar as they are possible. This transition accords with the essence of the information revolution. However, whereas the discussion of possible worlds is a central theme on the philosophical table, from Scotus through Leibniz, the information revolution is about to turn it from a theoretical exercise to the grounding of our new reality. To these philosophical reasons, others can be added, not necessarily philosophical, that emphasize the affinity between our age and the medieval one. Here are some examples: 1. The decline of Christendom and the rise of the nation-states is a key feature that marks the transition from the medieval world to the modern one. Together with globalization and identity politics, the information revolution reduces the power of the state and promotes a non-localized “universal” community, an information church. 2. One of the keystones of the modern mindset was the scientific and philosophical skepticism that strove to build a world that is built upon well-established beliefs. The information revolution reverses this modernistic principle. However, instead of dogmatic truths that the church dictates, the concept of truth as a whole is forsaken as misleading. Instead of truth, what is important is the appearance that is conjoined to power. 3. In the medieval world, the church offered its members a path to salvation that was attentive to our psychological needs. The modern era, through a combination of science and state, offers both a view of the ultimate truth together with answering our need for an extended family. Instead of an objective quest for evident knowledge, the new information church offers its flock like-minded environments that bubble it in a manner that addresses subjective truths and psychological needs, utterly dissociated from any form of objectivity.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1. Dan Garber, “What’s Philosophical about the History of Philosophy?,” in Analytic Philosophy and the History of Philosophy, ed. Tom Sorell and G. A. J. Rogers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 145. 2. The list of studies on creation is endless, the following is present key historical studies: Colin E. Gunton, The Triune Creator: A Historical and Systematic Study, vol. 3 (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 1998); Robert W Jenson, “Systematic Theology: The Works of God (Vol. 2),” (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Richard Sorabji, “Time, Creation, and the Continuum: Theories in Antiquity and the Early Middle Ages,” (1983); Gerhard May, Creatio ex nihilo (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2004); N Joseph Torchia, Creatio Ex Nihilo and the Theology of St. Augustine (New York, 1999). 3. Ioan Couliano, The Tree of Gnosis: Gnostic Mythology from Early Christianity to Modern Nihilism (San Francisco: Harper Collins, 1992), 13. 4. Quoted in Philip J Lee, Against the Protestant Gnostics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 9. 5. Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (The MIT Press, 1985), 128. 6. In this respect it should be noted that the Platonic tradition, perhaps going back to Parmenides’s Two Ways, advanced the mythological idea that man has fallen from a state of perfection, from the Truth of the goddess, into the state of shadows and opinion. Plato’s myths are perfect examples of how philosophical doctrines systematize these mythological views, e.g., his Recollection Doctrine and his Chariot and Cave Allegories. The treatment of matter as memory in chapter 2 neutralizes the mythological ground that exists in Plato’s allegories and which supports the Gnostic view. 7. May, Creatio ex nihilo, 7, 21–25. 8. On Gnosis see Hans Jonas, The Gnostic Religion: The Message of the Alien God and the Beginnings of Christianity (Beacon Press, 1958). 139

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9. See John Inglis, “Emanation in Historical Context: Aquinas and the Dominican Response to the Cathars,” Dionysius17 (1999): 99. 10. Aquinas, De Potentia 3.1. 11. Inglis, “Emanation in Historical Context: Aquinas and the Dominican Response to the Cathars,” 116. 12. See e.g. propositions 20–23, 25–28, 30, 66–69, 80, 83–95, 99–103, 107–112, 129–131, 138–139, 159–169, 187–191, 194–198. 13. See for example L. Honnefelder, “Der zweite Anfang der Metaphysik. Voraussetzungen, Ansätze und Folgen der Wiederbegründung der Metaphysikim 13./14. Jahr hundert,” in Philosophie im Mittelalter. Entwicklungslinien und Paradigmen, ed. J. P. Beckmann (Hamburg: Meiner, 1987); J. A. Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy as Transcendental Thought: From Philip the Chancellor (ca. 1225) to Francisco Suárez, vol. 107, Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, (Brill, 2012), 75–76. 14. QDV q. 1, a. 1. 15. On the medieval doctrine of the Transcendentals see J.A. Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy as Transcendental Thought: From Philip the Chancellor (ca. 1225) to Francisco Suárez, vol. 107, Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichtedes Mittelalters, (Brill, 2012); J.A. Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy and the Transcendentals: The Case of Thomas Aquinas, StudienUndTexte Zur Geistesgeschichte Des Mittelalters, (Brill, 1996); J.A. Aertsen, “What is First and Most Fundamental? The Beginnings of Transcendental Philosophy,” in What Is Philosophy in the Middle Ages?, ed. J.A. Aertsen and Andreas Speer, Miscellanea Mediaevalia (De Gruyter, 1998); J.A. Aertsen, “Avicenna’s Doctrine Of The Primary Notions And Its Impact On Medieval Philosophy,” in Islamic Thought in the Middle Ages: Studies in Text, Transmission and Translation, in Honour of Hans Daiber, ed. Wim Raven and Hans Daiber, Islamic Philosophy, Theology and Science (Brill, 2008); Allan B Wolter, The Transcendentals and their Function in the Metaphysics of Duns Scotus (St. Bonaventure, N.Y.: The Franciscan Institute, 1946); John F. Wippel, “Truth in Thomas Aquinas (I),” Journal Article, Review of Metaphysics 43, no. 2 (1989), http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?d irect=true&db=phl&AN=PHL1184619&site=ehost-live; Giorgio Pini, “Scotus and Avicenna on What it is to Be a Thing,” in The Arabic, Hebrew and Latin Reception of Avicenna’s Metaphysics, ed. Dag Nikolaus Hasse and Amos Bertolacc, Scientia Graeco-Arabica (2011). 16. Mary Beth Ingham, Scotus for Dunces (Franciscan Institute Publications, 2003), 37–69; Ilia Delio, A Franciscan View of Creation: Learning to Live in a Sacramental World (Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure University, 2003), 33–40. 17. Olivier Boulnois, “Création, contingenceetsingularité, De Thomas d’Aquinà Duns Scot,” in Archaeology at the North-East Anatolian Frontier, I, ed. Jean Greisch and Ghislaine Florival (Louvain: Peeters Publishers, 1995). 18. David B Burrell, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective (John Wiley & Sons, 2008), 176–89. 19. R. A. Te Velde, “Metaphysics and the Question of Creation: Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Us,” in Belief and Metaphysics, ed. PM Candler and C. Cunningham (2007).

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20. This common Heideggerian theme can be found, e.g. in Martin Heidegger, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, trans. Albert Hofstadter (Indiana University Press, 1988), 77–121. 21. Burrell, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective, 178. 22. Te Velde, “Metaphysics and the Question of Creation: Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Us,” 78. 23. Te Velde, “Metaphysics and the Question of Creation: Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Us,” 78. 24. Burrell, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective, 177. 25. In comparing and distinguishing between Aquinas’s and Scotus’s account of the question of creation, Oliver Boulnois most acutely emphasizes this point. See Boulnois, “Création, contingenceetsingularité, De Thomas d’Aquinà Duns Scot,” 11–12. 26. Delio, A Franciscan View of Creation: Learning to Live in a Sacramental World, 33. 27. Burrell, Faith and Freedom: An Interfaith Perspective, 178. 28. Matthew Drever, “Redeeming Creation: Creatio ex nihilo and the Imago Dei in Augustine,” International Journal of Systematic Theology 15, no. 2 (2013): 142. See also the discussion of the difference between creatio de/ex in Torchia, Creatio Ex Nihilo and the Theology of St. Augustine, 135–64. 29. Ingham, Scotus for Dunces, 38. 30. Delio, A Franciscan View of Creation: Learning to Live in a Sacramental World, 33. 31. Boulnois, “Création, contingenceetsingularité, De Thomas d’Aquinà Duns Scot,” 10. 32. Blumenberg, The legitimacy of the modern age, 149. 33. ST. I, 19.3, res. Translation from Kevin P Keane, “Why Creation? Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas on God as Creative Good,” Downside Review93 (1975). 34. ST. I, 19. 4, ad. 3. 35. ST. I, 19.5, ad. 1. 36. Commentarium in II LibrumSententiarum, 1, 2, 1, 1, resp. Translation from Keane, “Why Creation? Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas on God as Creative Good.” See also Itinerarium Mentis in Deum 6.2. 37. Itinerarium Mentis in Deum 6.2. 38. Ord. I, d. 10, n. 47 [4:359]. 39. Ord. I, d. 10, n. 40, 47–49 [4:359–360].

CHAPTER 1 1. This chapter is based on Liran Shia Gorden, “Matter, Place, and Being from a Scotistic Point of View: A Bypass to the Psycho-Physical Problem?,” Philosophy and Theology 28, no. 1 (2016), https://doi.org/10.5840/philtheol201662747. 2. Antonie Vos, The Philosophy of John Duns Scotus (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006), 362.

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3. This is of course a very general and mixed conception of matter, as it appears in the thought of Plato and Aristotle. Since this paper is not intended as a deeper investigation into the Greek conception, a more accurate description can be found in Ernan McMullin and Joseph Bobik, The Concept of Matter in Greek and Medieval Philosophy, vol. 46 (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1965). Richard Sorabji, Matter, Space and Motion: Theories in Antiquity and Their Sequel (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1988); Michael Sullivan, “The Debate over Spiritual Matter in the Late Thirteenth Century: Gonsalvus Hispanus and the Franciscan Tradition from Bonaventure to Scotus” (Dissertation, The Catholic University of America, 2011), 1–36. For a survey of early modern conception of matter and particularly the Scotistic impact, see Roger Ariew, “Descartes and His Critics on Matter and Form: Atomism and Individuation,” in Matter and Form in Early Modern Science and Philosophy, ed. Gideon Manning, History of Science and Medicine Library, Scientific and Learned Cultures and Their Institutions (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2012). 4. Lect. II, d. 12, n. 11 [19:72]. See also Ibid. nn. 17–18 [19:74]. 5. Ibid., n. 21, n. 29. [19:75]. 6. Ibid., n. 79 [19:101]. 7. Rep. I-A, d. 36, n. 107–08, 141 [2:417, 427–27]. 8. Rep. I-A, d.36, n. 88 [2:410]: “[N]o idea in God corresponds to matter, because according to the Philosopher, Bk. I of the Physics, matter cannot be an object of knowledge or understanding except indirectly through form. Now the idea of something is formed [only] in the manner in which it is known; however, matter cannot be known except indirectly through form; therefore, the idea that corresponds to it will simply be the idea of form. At the same time, God can know parts of a composite separately from its form: namely, [he can know] matter insofar as it is part of a composite; therefore, [he can know it] without a corresponding idea.” 9. Ibid, n. 97 (2:412–3): “Insofar as it is a principle of production and generation of things is called the principle or exemplar and pertains to practical knowledge. However, insofar as it is a principle of cognition of a thing, it is properly called a concept (or notion) and pertains to speculative knowledge. Now the latter is aimed at all the things that God can know, even though they may not exist at any point in time, or even at everything that can be known by him under its proper notion. At the same time, the idea in God that functions as the exemplar serves as a practical principle of all those things that come to exist under some temporal aspect,-and in this sense it does not apply to all that can come into existence through God s agency, but [only] to the things that are meant to come into being at a certain point in time.” 10. Rep. I-A, d. 36, 88, n. 98 [2:410]. 11. Ibid, nn. 100–01 [2:414–15]. 12. Rep. IV-A, d. 11, q. 3, n. 85 [2:411]. I wish to thank Oleg Bychkov for allowing me to use his translation of the distinction prior to its publication. 13. See Richard Cross, The Physics of Duns Scotus: The Scientific Context of a Theological Vision (Oxford: New York: Clarendon Oxford Press, 1998), 257–63. 14. Antoine Cote, “Henri de Gand, Quodlibet I, question 10. Introduction, traduction et notes,” Science et Esprit 55, no. 2 (2003).

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15. For Aquinas’s conception of matter, see Matthew Alexander Kent, “Prime Matter According to St. Thomas Aquinas” (PhD Dissertation, Fordham University, 2006); Christopher Hughes, “Matter and Actuality in Aquinas,” Revue Internationalede Philosophie 52, no. 204 (1998); Joseph Bobik, Aquinason Matter and Form and the Elements (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1998). 16. Henrici de Gandavo, Quod libet I, ed. R Macken, Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, Series 2: Henrici de Gandavo Opera Omnia, (Leuven University Press, 1979), q. 10, 63. 17. J. F. Wippel, The Metaphysical Thought of Godfrey of Fontaines: A Study in Late Thirteenth-Century Philosophy (CUA Press, 1999), 263–64. 18. Gandavo, QuodlibetI, q. 10, 68. Scotus presents this view in Lect. II, d. 12, n. 45 [19:86]. See also Wippel, 364. 19. Henry of  Ghent, “Summa,” The Questions on God’s Unity and Simplicity (articles 25–30), trans. Roland J. Teske, vol. 25, Dallas Medieval Texts and Translations, (Peeters Publishers, 2006), a. 27, q. 1, 161. 20. Ibid. 21. Lect. I, d. 36, n. 26 [17:468–9] 22. Ord. I, d. 36, n. 36 [6:285] 23. Lect. II, d. 12, n. 49 [19:88] 24. Ibid., n. 61 [19:92–93]. Scotus is famous for his treatment of the different kinds of unities, particularly in relation to individuation and his notion of common nature. For further reading see Cross, The Physics of Duns Scotus, 7–9; Richard Cross, “Divisibility, Communicability, and Predicability in Duns Scotus’s Theories of the Common Nature,” Medieval Philosophy and Theology 11, no. 1 (2003); Wolter, The Transcendentals and their Function in the Metaphysics of Duns Scotus, 101–11; Jorge JE Gracia, “Individuality and the Individuating Entity in Scotus’s Ordinatio: An Ontological Characterization,” in  John Duns Scotus Metaphysics and Ethics, ed. Ludger Honnefelder and Rega Wood, Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichtedes Mittelalters (New York: Brill, 1996); Peter King, “Duns Scotus on the Common Nature and the Individual Differentia,” Philosophical Topics 20, no. 2 (2010), https:// doi.org/10.5840/philtopics199220215. 25. Lect. II, d. 12, n. 30, n. 62 [19:80, 93]; Rep. IV-A, d. 11, q. 3, n. 86 [2:411–12] and the discussion of Potency in QM.IX, q. 1; for further reading see Ansgar Santogrossi, “Duns Scotus on Potency Opposed to Act in Questions on the Metaphysics, IX,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 67, no. 1 (2008), https://doi. org/10.5840/acpq199367146. 26. William O Duba, “Aristotelian Traditions in Franciscan Thought: Matter and Potency according to Scotus and Auriol,” in The origins of European scholarship: the Cyprus Millennium International Conference, ed. Ioannis Taifacos (Stuttgart: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2005), 151. 27. Lect. II, d. 12, n. 37 [19:82] 28. Ord. I, d. 3, p.2, n. 310 [3:188–89], summarizing Henry’s position in Ghent, Summa, 25, a. 21, q. 4, solution. 29. Ibid., n. 313 [3:190]. 30. Ibid., n. 311 [3:189].

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31. See Jean-françois Courtine, “Res, Ens,” in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. Barbara Cassin (Princeton: NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 494–504. Further discussion on Scotus’s criticism and absorption of Henry’s ontology, see Steven P. Marrone, The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century, 2 vols, Studies in the History of Christian Traditions, (Brill, 2001), 460–80. 32. Ord. I, d. 36, n. 48 [6:290]. 33. Ibid., n. 49 [6:290] 34. Richard Cross, Duns Scotus, Great Medieval Thinkers, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 149. 35. Ord. I, d. 36, n. 53 [6:292] 36. Lect. II, d. 12, n. 49 [19:88] 37. For a concise summary of real and formal distinction, see Richard Cross, Duns Scotus, Great Medieval Thinkers, (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 149. 38. Lect. II, d. 12, n. 53 [19:90]. See also Ord.2.3.187 [7:483]. 39. Cross, The Physics of Duns Scotus, 37. 40. Rep. II, d. 12, q. 2, n. 12 [23:20]. See also Lect. II, d. 12, n. 56 [19:90]. 41. Translation in Cross, The Physics of Duns Scotus, 38. 42. Lect. II, d. 12, n. 54 [19:90]. 43. Rep. II, d. 12, q. 2, n. 12. 44. Cross, The Physics of Duns Scotus, 41. 45. For a discussion on the history of the concept of information and its modern technological use, see e.g., John Durham Peters, “Information: Notes toward a critical history,” Journal of Communication Inquiry 12, no. 2 (1988); Rafael Capurro and Birger Hjorland, “The concept of information,” Annual review of information science and technology 37, no. 1 (2003); Rafael Capurro, “Past, Present, and Future of the concept of information,” Triple C: Communication, Capitalism & Critique. Open Access Journal for a Global Sustainable Information Society 7, no. 2 (2009). 46. Henning Spang-Hanssen, “How to Teach about Information as Related to Documentation?,” Human IT: Journal for Information Technology Studies as a Human Science 5, no. 1 (2001). 47. Capurro, “Past, Present, and Future of the Concept of Information,” 128. 48. Capurro, “Past, Present, and Future of the Concept of Information,” 129.

CHAPTER 2 1. This chapter is based on Gordon, “Matter, Place, and Being from a Scotistic Point of View: A Bypass to the Psycho-Physical Problem?” 2. For Scotus’s full account see OrdinatioI, d. 3, q. 2 that has recently appeared in John Duns Scotus, On Being and Cognition: Ordinatio 1.3, trans. John van den Bercken (New York: Fordham University Press, 2016). 3. Scotus’s doctrine of the univocity of being is one of the hallmarks of Scotus’s thought and is discussed extensively by the secondary literature. See for example Stephen D. Dumont, “Transcendental being: Scotus and Scotists,” Topoi 11, no. 2 (1992);

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W. A. Frank and A. B. Wolter, Duns Scotus, Metaphysician (Purdue University Press, 1995), 141–44; Cross, Duns Scotus, 33–39. 4. Rep. I-A,d. 35, q. 2. 5. Rep. I-A,d. 36, q. 1. 6. Rep. I-A, d. 35, q. 2, n. 53 [2:366], Ibid., I, d. 35, q. 2, n. 90 [378–79],Ibid., I, d. 36, q. 1, nn. 10–11 [2:383]. 7. Rep. I-A,d. 36, q.1, n. 11 [2:383]. 8. Ibid., n.12 [2:383–83]. 9. Ibid., n.15 [2:384–85]. 10. Ibid., n.29 [2:388]. 11. Ibid., n. 32 [2:391]. 12. Ibid., n.45 [2:393]. 13. Ibid., n. 38 [2:391]. 14. Ibid., n. 49 [2:395]. 15. Ibid., n.50, 56 [2:395, 398]. See Timothy B. Noone, “Scotus on Divine Ideas: Reportatio Paris. I–A, d. 36,” Medioevo 24 (1998): 369. 16. Ord. I, d. 35, n. 32 [6:258]. See also Rep I, d. 36, q. 2, nn. 60–66 [2:399–403]. 17. Ord. I, d. 35, n. 27 [6:256]. 18. Ord. I, prologue, n. 200 [1:135]. 19. Ord. I, d. 35, n. 49 [6:266]. 20 . Rep. I-A, d.36, q.1, n. 12 [2:383–84]. 21. Scotus distinguishes between creation and production and concludes that “to be produced is not to be created, because something is not created into being without ado, but is produced into being in a certain respect.” Ord. II, d. 1, q. 1, nn. 82–4 [7:43–44] 22. Ord. I, d. 35, n. 49 [6:266] 23. Ord. I, d. 36, q. 1, n. 47 [6:291] 24. Ord. I, d. 35, nn. 32–35, n. 44, n. 54 [6:283–5, 288, 292–3]. 25. Ord. I, d. 36, n. 41 [6:287] 26. Rep.  I-A, d. 3, q. 4, n. 109 [1:215]. Identical to Ord.  I, d. 3, Appendice A [3:364–65]. 27. Ord. I, d. 45, q. 3 [4–5] Translation from Wolter and Adams 1993, 213–14. 28. Quodl., q. 15, n. 61 [362]. Scotus distinguishes between the essential passive act of the possible intellect whereby it receives the species, and the accidental active act of the possible intellect, the reception of intellection. See Boulnois, 200–1. 29. Ord. I, d. 30, qq. 1–2, n. 31 [6:181–2]. 30. Rep I-A, d. 32, qq. 1–2, nn. 29–30 [2:301–2]. 31. Ord. I, d. 32, q. 2, n. 23 [6:230–1]: “For there memory produces actual knowledge, which has a twofold relation to the memory: namely ‘produced to producing,’ which is of the second mode of relations that is mutual,–-and the other ‘of declaring to what has been declared,’ which is of the third mode of relations and which is not mutual. . . . For if someone produces a mirror and in it images are reflected, although the mirror formally declare those reflections, however that ‘producing mirror’ efficiently declares them.”

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32. In  Ord. I, d. 3, p. 3, Scotus analyzes the difference between the process by which the intellect abstracts and stores the intelligible species, and the production of begotten knowledge. See also Ord.I, d. 27, q. 1, nn. 42–84 [6:81–98]. Though both processes are co-caused, the first process of the production and conservation of intelligible species, is co-caused by the intellect and the phantasm in a natural way, whereas the production of the begotten knowledge, which is co-caused by the intellect and the intelligible species, is not a natural process, although specified by the intelligible species. To understand the difference between natural and free co-causation, Scotus explains that there a son for understanding is to be found in the understanding itself and not in the causality that caused the act of understanding. Ord. I, d. 27. n. 55 [6:86]. See also Russell L. Friedman, Intellectual Traditions at the Medieval University: The Use of Philosophical Psychology in Trinitarian Theology Among the Franciscans and Dominicans, 1250–1350, 2 vols., vol. 108, Studienund Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, (Brill, 2012), 397–407. 33. See Ord. I, d. 45, n. 9 [6:374]. See also Tobias Hoffmann, “Freedom Beyond Practical Reason: Duns Scotus on Will-Dependent Relations,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 21, no. 6 (2013): 1072–73, 84–136, https://doi.org/10.1080/09 608788.2013.855162. 34. See Udo Thiel, “The Concept of a Person in Eighteenth-Century German Philosophy,” in Persons: A History ed. Antonia LoLordo, Oxford Philosophical Concepts (Oxford University Press, 2019), 201. 35. In order to save the reader from further complications, a discussion of the difference between intuitive and abstractive cognitions is skipped. For further reading see Richard Cross, Duns Scotus’s Theory of Cognition, First edition. ed., Theory of Cognition, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014); Stephen D. Dumont, “Theology as a Science and Duns Scotus’s Distinction between Intuitive and Abstractive Cognition,” Speculum: A Journal of Medieval Studies 64, no. 3 (1989), https://doi. org/10.2307/2854184; Allan B. Wolter and Marilyn McCord Adams, “Memory and Intuition: A Focal Debate in Fourteenth Century Cognitive Psychology,” Franciscan Studies 53, no. 1 (1993), https://doi.org/10.1353/frc.1993.0006; Allan B. Wolter, “Intuition, Memory, and Knowledge of Individuals,” in The Philosophical Theology of John Duns Scotus, ed. Marilyn McCord Adams (Cornell University Press Ithaca New York, 1990). 36. The notion of incommunicability functions as that which constitutes the uniqueness of the persons and is deeply related to the notion of haecceity of things (qualified differently in regard to created and uncreated beings). For further reading on this important issue, see Rep I-A, d. 5, nn. 109–10; Rep I-A, d. 26, nn. 44–71, nn. 104–5. Ord I, d. 26, interpolation of n. 50. See also Richard Cross, Duns Scotus on God, Ashgate Studies in the History of Philosophical Theology, (Aldershot, Hants, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2005), Part II, particularly chapters 12 & 13; Stephen A. Hipp, “The Doctrine of Personal Subsistence in John Duns Scotus,” in John Duns Scotus, Philosopher. Proceedings of The Quadruple Congress, ed. O. V. Bychkov and Mary Beth Ingham, Archa Verbi. Subsidia 3 (St. Bonaventure, NY: Münster Franciscan Institute Publications: Aschendorff Verlag, 2010).

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CHAPTER 3 1. This chapter is based on Gordon, “Matter, Place, and Being from a Scotistic Point of View: A Bypass to the Psycho-Physical Problem?” 2. Edward Casey, The Fate of Place: A Philosophical History (University of California Press, 1997), 13. 3. Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Maria Boulding, 1st ed.ed. (New York: New City Press, 1998), 158–59. 4. See Sorabji, Matter, Space and Motion: Theories in Antiquity and Their Sequel. For the reception of the Jewish-Arabic theo-philosophical conception place by the Latins see Yossef Schwartz, “Divine Space and the Space of the Divine: On the Scholastic Rejection of Arab Cosmology,” in Représentationset conceptions de l’espacedans la culture medieval, ed. Tiziana Suarez-Nani and Martin Rohde, Scrinium Friburgense (Berlin/Boston: Walter de Gruyter, 2011); Yossef Schwartz, “Celestial motion, immaterial causality and the Latin encounter with Arabic Aristotelian Cosmology,” in Albertus Magnus und der Ursprung der Universitätsidee, ed. Ludger Honnefelder (Berlin: Berlin University Press, 2011). 5. Pierre Duhem, Medieval Cosmology: Theories of Infinity, Place, Time, Void, and the Plurality of Worlds, trans. Roger Ariew (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 183. 6. Helen S. Lang, “Bodies and Angels: The Occupants of Place for Aristotle and Duns Scotus,” Viator 14, no. 1 (1983): 246, https://doi.org/10.1484/J. VIATOR.2.301457. See Ord. II, d. 2, n. 219. 7. Cross, The Physics of Duns Scotus, 116. 8. Quodl. q. 11, n. 28 [264]. See also Duhem, Medieval Cosmology, 183–84; Cross, The Physics of Duns Scotus, 194. 9. Ibid. 10. Ord. II, d. 2, q. 2, qq. 1–2, n .216 [7:253]; Lect. II, d. 2, q. 2, n. 191 [18:161]. See also Cross, The Physics of Duns Scotus, 194–95; Tiziana Suarez-Nani, “Angels, Space, and Place: The Location of Separate Substances according to John Duns Scotus,” in Angels in Medieval Philosophical Inquiry: Their Function and Significance, ed. IsabelI Ribarren and Martin Lenz, Studies in Medieval Philosophy (Aldershot, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2008), 99; Olivier Boulnois, “Du lieu cosmique à l’espace continu? La représentation de l’espaceselon Duns Scot et les condamnations de 1277,” in Raumund Raum vorstellungen im Mittelalter, ed. JanA. Aertsen and Andreas Speer, Miscellanea Mediaevalia (Berlin; NewYork: de Gruyter, 1998), 320. 11. Suarez-Nani, “Angels, Space, and Place: The Location of Separate Substances according to John Duns Scotus,” 99–100. 12. This break can be seen as a continuation and radicalization of Giles’s criticism of the organic Judeo-Arabic conception of the spheres as animated. Schwartz explains that the tenth article of Giles’s De erorres philosophorum, “is dedicated to the false conception of the celestial spheres as animated living entities, being analogous to the human body-mindsystem. Against such an assumption, the author quotes as Catholic authority Damascenus, claiming that the heavens are in animate and insensible.” It can be argued, with some caution, that any such breaking of the organic unity of the

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cosmos opens the door for Scotus to break with the essentiality of the cosmological notion of place. See Schwartz, “Celestial motion, immaterial causality and the Latin encounter with Arabic Aristotelian Cosmology,” 292. 13. Lang, “Bodies and Angels: The Occupants of Place for Aristotle and Duns Scotus,” 249. 14. Lang, “Bodies and Angels: The Occupants of Place for Aristotle and Duns Scotus,” 253–54. See also Duhem, Medieval Cosmology, 186. 15. Ord. II, d. 2, qq. 1–2, n. 229 [7:258–59]. 16. Quodl., q. 10, n. 42 [248]: “Take the first case, viz., that the same thing that was moving in one place was at rest in the other. There is no contradiction here any more than there is for it to be both here and there. For local motion and rest are posterior by nature to ubiety itself and hence can be varied according to variation in what is prior.” This suggests that Scotus distinguishes between the thing as it is in itself which is determined internally and the thing in relation to others which is determined contingently, as a phenomenon. 17. Duhem, Medieval Cosmology, 187. : “The distinction between the fact of lodging and the fact of being lodged, between place and the ubi, is the foundation of the explanation of the movement of the final celestial sphere. The final celestial sphere is not contained by any body. It is not in a place; it does not have a ubi.” 18. Ord. II, d. 2, qq. 1–2, n. 231 [7:269]. See also Quodl., q. 11, n. 12 [260]. See also Adams discussion of the difference between Categorical and Quantitative positions. Marilyn McCord Adams, “Bodies in Their Places: Multiple Location according to John Duns Scotus,” in Johannes Duns Scotus 1308–2008: Investigations into his Philosophy, ed. Ludger Honnefelderetal, Proceedings of The Quadruple Congress on John Duns Scotus (Münster Aschendorff Verlag, 2010); Marilyn McCord Adams, Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Gilles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 116–8. 19. Rep. IV-A, d. 11, q. 2, nn. 45–6 [2:396–97] 20. Cross, The Physics of Duns Scotus, 159–60. A similar account of condensation and rarefication is given by Ockham, see André Goddu, The Physics of William of Ockham, vol. 16, Studien Und Texte Zur Geistesgeschichte Des Mittelalters, (Leiden: Brill, 1984), 101–6. 21. See Lect.I, d. 17, n. 210 [17:248]. In their translation of Rep.I-A, Wolter and Bychkov translate quantita te molis as “quantity of mass.” 22. For further reading, see Max Jammer, Concepts of Mass in Classical and Modern Physics (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1961), 37–48. Jammer explains that Giles was deeply influenced by Averroes’s distinction between determinate indeterminate dimensions, according to which “Determinate dimensionality is an accident, capable of being increased or decreased; indeterminate dimensionality is a form, essential to matter.” This distinction, he continues, alludes, probably for the first time, “to the possibility of conceiving the essence of matter in its dynamic behavior.” (38–40). 23. Cross explains there that the relation between matter and quantity is similar to that of essence and existence. For further discussion on the relation between matter

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and quantity in Giles’s thought and its relation to the distinction between essence and existence, see Richard Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation: Thomas Aquinas to Duns Scotus (Oxford University Press, 2003), 91–5. Also see Adams, Some Later Medieval Theories of the Eucharist: Thomas Aquinas, Gilles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham, 142. 24. This treatment of mass under the category of substance allows the corporality of the substance to transcend the accidentality which accompanies the category of quantity. See Rep. I-A, d. 17, q. .2, nn. 174–75 [1:510–11]: “because in an extended substance [the existence of] parts [of the substance] side by side with other parts of the substance is not the same as its quantity. Otherwise the corporeal substance would be as simple quantitatively as the intellective soul. Hence, I assume presently, namely that a part of substance is something different from [simply] another part of the quantity. Moreover, it is impossible that quantity be the causative principle of substance in [that] second part, because it is not an active form. And in this way each part of the substance is naturally prior to each part of the quantity.” Also Lect. I, d. 17, n. 219 [17:251–52]. 25. Cross, The Physics of Duns Scotus, 166–69. See Lect. I, d. 17, n. 219, n. 230, n. 240 [17:251–52, 254, 258]; Ord.II, d. 3, p. 1, q. 4, n. 114, n. 116 [7:447–48]. 26. Rep. IV-A, d. 11, n. 46 [2:397]. 27. For more on the understanding of immateriality and its relation to materiality see Stephen Priest, “Duns Scotus on the Immaterial,” The Philosophical Quarterly 48, no. 192 (1998), https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9213.00108; Sheldon M. Cohen, “St. Thomas Aquinas on the immaterial reception of sensible forms,” The Philosophical Review 91, no. 2 (1982), https://doi.org/10.2307/2184626; Miles Burnyeat, “Aquinas on ‘Spiritual Change’ in Perception,” in Ancient and Medieval Theories of Intentionality, ed. Dominik Perler, Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichtedes Mittelalters (2001). 28. For further reading on the condemnation of 1277 see Nach der Verurteilungvon 1277. Philosophie und Theologie an der Universitätvon Parisimletzten Vierteldes 13. Jahrhunderts. Studien und Texte, ed. Kent Emery and Andreas Speer (Berlin/New York: Brill, 2001). 29. Ord. II, d. 2, qq. 1–2, n. 231 [7:269]. See also Quodl., q. 11, n. 10 [260]. 30. Lang, “Bodies and Angels: The Occupants of Place for Aristotle and Duns Scotus,” 259–60. 31. Quodl., q. 10, n. 37 [246–47]. 32. Quodl., q. 10, n. 47 [249–50]. 33. One may say that it is one thing to speak of the thinking act regarding material objects or phantasms and another thing when the soul thinks universals or the principle of non-contradiction, which are non localized acts of thinking. This is correct, but such mental activities can also be carried out by the separated soul standing all by itself, i.e., such mental activities do not add new specific knowledge that is not contained in what is already known.

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CHAPTER 4 1. This chapter is based on Liran Shia Gordon, “On Truth, the Truth of Existence, and the Existence of Truth: A Dialogue with the Thought of Duns Scotus,” Philosophy & Theology 27, no. 2 (2015), https://doi.org/10.5840/philtheol2015103035. 2. Though Henry is not discussed at length in the paper, he was certainly kept in mind throughout the reading/writing process. Due to space restrictions I cannot but refer the reader to important studies examining Henry’s conception of truth and how it impacted Scotus and was criticized in Scotus’s thought, see Marrone, The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century; Steven P Marrone, Truth and Scientific Knowledge in the Thought of Henry of Ghent (Medieval Academy of America, 1985); Dumont, “Transcendental being: Scotus and scotists.” 3. For a discussion on this crucial distinction see Allan B. Wolter, “Duns Scotus on the Will as Rational Potency,” in The Philosophical Theology of John Duns Scotus, ed. Marilyn McCord Adams (Ithaca New York: Cornell University Press1990). 4. See also J. F. Wippel, “Truth in Thomas Aquinas,” The Review of Metaphysics (1989): 310–11. 5. Aquinas, QDV q. 1, a. 2, Reply. 6. Aquinas, Sentences I, d. 19, q. 5, aa. 1–3 7. J. F. Wippel, “Truth in Thomas Aquinas,” The Review of Metaphysics (1989): 299. 8. More on God as Truth see William Wood, “Thomas Aquinas on the Claim that God is Truth,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 51, no. 1 (2013). 9. Wippel, “Truth in Thomas Aquinas,” 315. 10. QDV. q. 1, a. 4. See also ST I, q. 16, a. 5. 11. Despite dealing the question explicitly in book six of the Questions on the Metaphysics, asking “whether the true is the object of metaphysics?” 12. Marrone, The Light of Thy Countenance, 400; Wolter, The Transcendentals and their Function in the Metaphysics of Duns Scotus, 111–18. 13. Scotus, In Duos Libros Peri Hermenias, q. 3, n. 3 [Vivès, 1:588a]. 14.  Avicenna, Avicenna Latinus. Liber de Philosophia Prima, sive, Scientia Divina: Idition Critiquede La Traduction Latine Midiivale, ed. Simone Van Riet (Brill, 1977), I, ch. 5, 31-32. 15. Avicenna, Avicenna  Latinus.  Liberdephilosophiaprima,  sive,  Scientia divina: Idition Critique de La Traduction Latine Midiivale, 33. 16. Cf. J. A. Aertsen, “What is First and Most Fundamental? The Beginnings of Transcendental Philosophy,” in What Is Philosophy in the Middle Ages?, ed. J.A. Aertsen and Andreas Speer, Miscellanea Mediaevalia (De Gruyter, 1998). 17. Ibid, p. 35: “Redeamusigitur et dicamus quod (. . .) est hoc quod una qua eque res hab etc ertitudin empropriam quae est eius quidditas.” 18. Bonaventure, Sent. 2.37, dub. I (ed. Quaracchi, Opera Omnia II) 19. ST. I, q. 5, a. 2. 20. Aquinas, Sent. I, d. 25, q. 1, n .4. 21. Aquinas, Sent. 2.37.1.1.

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22. Henrici de Gandavo, Summa (Quaestiones Ordinariae), art. XXXI-XXXIV, ed. R Macken, Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, Series 2: Henrici de Gandavo Opera Omnia, (Leuven University Press, 1991), a. 34, q. 2, 174. 23. Ibid., 175. 24. Ghent, Summa, 25, a. 27, q. 1, 159. 25. More on Scotus’s criticism and absorption of Henry’s ontology see Marrone, The Light of Thy Countenance, 460–80. 26. Ord. I, d. 36, n. 1 [4:271]. 27. Ord. I, d. 3, p. 2, n. 305 [3:186]. 28. Ibid., n. 313 [3:190]. 29. Bonaventure, Sent. 1.3.2.4, Scholium. 30. Ord. I, d. 3, p. 2, n. 296 [3:180]: “that those three relations belong to the three modes of relatives, this appears to be false, because . . . in the first two . . . it is a mutual relation, in the third it is not . . . but not all relation of creature to God is mutual . . . therefore every relation of creature to God is according to the third mode.” 31. Ord. I, d. 3, p. 2, nn. 295–98 [3:179–81]. 32. See Rep. I-A, d. 39–40, q. 1–3, n. 25 [2: 471]. 33. QM.IX, q. 15, nn. 21–22 (2:608). See also Ord. IV-A, d. 43, q. 4, n. 2; RepI-A, d. 10, q. 3, n. 54. For more on that See Cruz González-Ayesta, “Scotus’s Interpretation of Metaphysics 9.2: On the Distinction between Nature and Will,” Proceedings of the American Catholic Philosophical Association 81 (2009): 218, https://doi.org/10.5840/ acpaproc20078123. Ayesta First outlines the different senses Scotus uses nature in his writings. See; See also Tobias Hoffmann, “The Distinction between Nature and Will in Duns Scotus,” Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du Moyen-âge 66 (1999). 34. Quodl. q. 16, n. 34 [379]. 35. Ibid. n. 13. 36. Aristotle, Metaphysics IX, q. 2, 1046b5–8: “Each of those which are accompanied by reason is alike capable of contrary effects, but one non-rational power produces one effect; e.g., the hot is capable only of heating, but the medical art can produce both disease and health.” Aristotle, Complete Works of Aristotle, ed. Jonathan Barnes, vol. 2 (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1984), 1652. See also XI, q. 5, 1048a 8–10 (1654–1655): “Non-rational potentialities are all productive of one effect each but the rational produce contrary effects, so that they would produce contrary effects at the same time.” 37. QM.IX, ch. 15, n. 73 [2:624–25]. 38. Ibid., n. 38 [2:612–13]. 39. Ibid., n. 61 [2:621]. 40. Quodl. q. 16, n. 36 [381–82]. 41. QM. IX, ch. 15, n.38 (2:612–13): “[the intellect] not only as regards its own acts is it not rational, but it is not fully rational even as regards the external acts it directs. As a matter of fact, speaking precisely, even as regards its intrinsic acts it is irrational. It is rational only in the qualified sense that it is a precondition for the act of a rational potency.” More on the relation between the will and the intellect see Mary Beth Ingham, “Did scotus modify his position on the relationship of intellect and

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will?” Recherches de théologie et philosophie médiévales 69, no. 1 (2002), https:// doi.org/10.2143/RTPM.69.1.965. 42. Rep I-A, d. 3, q. 4, n. 109 [1:215]. 43. Ord. I, d. 36, n. 48 [6:291]. 44. Hoffmann, “Freedom Beyond Practical Reason,” 1072. 45. Ord. I, d. 2, p. 2.qq. 1–4, n. 395 [2:353]. 46. Ord. I, d. 30, n. 41 [4:186–188] supports Hoffman’s position: “hence just as in eternity hecompares his will ‘as creative’ to the soul of Antichrist as possible for a certain time, so he compares in eternity his will ‘as creating’ to the soul of Antichrist as actually existing for the now for which he wishes to create that soul; and these indeed are two relations of reason, as they are two extremes, –- but each is eternal, although not for eternity.” 47. Ord. I, d. 45, nn. 8–11 [4:373–375]. The continuous repetition of this point in these paragraphs suggests its importance. 48. Ord. III, d. 33, n. 76 [10:175]. 49. Hoffmann, “Freedom Beyond Practical Reason,” 1076. See also Lect. III, d. 33, n. 71, (21:292). 50. Hoffmann, “Freedom Beyond Practical Reason,” 1084. 51. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Paul Guyer and Allen W Wood (Cambridge University Press, 1998), A716-7/B44-5. 52. Friedman explains that “[f]or us, the conjunction of ‘X is a triangle’ with these axioms does of course imply ‘X’s angles sum to 180°’ by logic alone. . . . [However] once we remember that Euclid’s axioms are not the axioms used in modern formulations and . . . [that] our axioms for Euclidean geometry arestrikingly different from Euclid’s” then “it is easy to see that the claim in question is perfectly correct.” Michael Friedman, “Kant’s Theory of Geometry,” The Philosophical Review 94, no. 4 (1985): 460–61. 53. Following Kant who says that “in the concept of a figure that is enclosed between two straight lines there is no contradiction, for the concepts of two straight lines and their intersection contain no negation of a figure; rather the impossibility rests not on the concept in itself, but on its construction in space, that is, from the conditions of space and of its determination” (B268), Wiredu concludes that “[t]he existence of non-Euclidean geometries merely as logically admissible systems does not conflict with Kant’s doctrine that the theses of Euclidean geometry are synthetic a priori.” J. E. Wiredu, “Kant’s synthetic a priori in geometry and the rise of noneuclidean geometries,” Kant-Studien 61, no. 1–4 (1970): 6. Against this Friedman claims that for Kant “the concept of a non-Euclidean figure remains “empty” and lacks both “sense and meaning,” for “if one assumes an object of a non-sensible intuition as given . . . then I have not represented the possibility of an object’’' for my pure concept of the understanding at all, since I cannot give any intuition that would correspond to it.” (B149) Friedman, “Kant’s theory of geometry,” 504. To this Carson replies that “it may be true . . . that only the intuitive representation of a line is adequate for mathematical reasoning, [but] it by no means follows that there can be ‘no idea’ of a non-Euclidian line or figure. . . . [W]hat is required is that we be able to entertain the possibility of other spaces; there need be no determinate conception

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of what that space would be like. Kant explicitly recognizes the possibility of other creatures with different modes of intuition,” Emily Carson, “Kant on intuition in geometry,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 27, no. 4 (1997): 503. 54. “[T]he discovery of logically consistent systems of non-Euclidean geometry . . . shows conclusively that Euclid’s axioms are not analytic and, therefore, that no analysis of the basic concepts of geometry could possibly explain their truth . . . then, there is no alternative but to appeal to a synthetic source: hence pure intuition.” Friedman, “Kant’s theory of geometry,” 487. 55. Contrary to Leibniz’s claim that “in every affirmative true proposition, necessary or contingent, universal or singular, the notion of the predicate is contained in some way in that of the subject, praedicatumin est subjecto. Or else I do not know what truth is.” Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, “Correspondence with Arnauld,” in Leibniz: Philosophical Writings (Dent, 1934), 73 (14 July 1686). 56. The case is the contrary, for only after determination can a concept be considered according to its objective reality: “It is, indeed, a necessary logical condition that a concept of the possible must not contain any contradiction; but this is not by any means sufficient to determine the objective reality of the concept, that is, the possibility of such an object as is thought through the concept.” (A220/B267-8) 57. Friedman explains that while D’Alembert viewed kinematical interpretation as damaging to “pure” mathematics since it “should be independent of and prior to mathematical physics . . . [and] should be developed in complete independence of the idea of motion. For Kant, on the other hand, this ‘mixing’ of physical and mathematical ideas is not a defect but a virtue . . . [and such] ‘mixing’ of physical and mathematical ideas is essential to the unity of Kant’s system.” Friedman, “Kant’s theory of geometry,” 481–2. Just as for Scotus the will perfects the intellect, so according to Kant, mathematical physics perfects pure mathematics. Moreover, Friedman explains that this perfection, i.e., the singularization of pure and abstract mathematics by the intuition, makes mathematical proofs, as opposed to philosophical ones, concrete while remaining a priori. This means “every false step becomes visible (A734/B762)” which allows us “to be assured of the correctnessof its substitutions and transformations.” Friedman, “Kant’s theory of geometry,” 492–3. Following this logic, it could be said that truths of the will do not merely add contingent truths, but also perfect abstract truths into concrete truths, which make visible false steps in reasoning. 58. Critique of Pure Reason, section IV, particularly A598-9/B626-7. 59. Uygar Abaci analyzes Kant’s conception of existence in order to explain what Kant meant by saying that “every existential proposition is synthetic” (A598/B626). Following Kant’s conclusion that existence is not contained in the subject, i.e., that “it does not add any further determinations to any subject, and thus does not enlarge it,” he asks, following a very similar rationale to the analysis undertaken in this paper, what “actually [is] added to the subject in existential propositions, or more generally, what kind of synthesis is conducted in existential propositions?” Uygar Abaci, “Kant’s Theses on Existence,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 16, no. 3 (2008): 574. However, by way of contrast to what is suggested here, i.e., by following Kant on the matter, Abaci contends that “the ascription of existence, or of other modes, to a subject can by no means contribute to the determination of the content or

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whatness of the object of that subject . . . for existence is not a real predicate or determination (A599/B627), no matter to what subject it may be ascribed, but is always a merely logical predicate.” Abaci, 580. Abaci explains that this is why a “hundred possible dollars is what is merely thought in the concept, a hundred actual dollars is what is also absolutely posited as the existing object that corresponds to the concept. Neither of them, however, is more real in the Kantian sense of the term; they have exactly the same content, ‘not more, not less.’ Otherwise, the actual money would not correspond to what I think in its concept as merely possible, and we would be talking instead about two concepts with different contents.” Abaci, 584–5. Abaci concludes that existence ascribes to a subject “the actual thing which is added to that subject concept” and that the “addition does not, however, increase or enlarge the content of the concept I have of the object whose actuality is asserted” but only “an actual correspondence or match is asserted between the actual object and the subject concept through which the object is thought as merely possible with exactly the same content.” Abaci, 588. Abaci further maintains that existence does not add anything to the concept in question when predicated of something, but only asserts a correspondence between the concept and the actual object. But as was explained, the 180° of the triangle is an existential truth. Once this has been duly considered, it will be seen to follow that if the predicate existence only added a correspondence between the concept and the actual object, then it would become impossible to know that a triangle has 180°. In other words, the actualization of a thing necessarily adds truths to its concept which cannot be derived from the concept alone. This brings us back to Scotus and Henry. As was shown above, Scotus accepted Henry’s distinction between three levels of reality, calling them opinable, quidditative, and existential realities. But Scotus went on to criticize Henry for thinking that the latter two levels have a different type of being. He claimed that essential beings are contained virtually in existential being. This seems to indicate that the third level of being, existential reality, simply perfects essential realities as being actual. However, the result of the investigation suggests that such perfection is not only related to becoming “actual,” but more accurately, by attaining the perfection of actuality, existential truths are synthesized or assimilated to essential truths, as a result of the process of their actualization into existence. 60. “Now the whole distinction which we draw between the merely possible and the actual rests upon the fact that possibility signifies only the positing of the representation of a thing relative to our concept, and, in general, to our capacity of thinking, whereas actuality signifies the positing of a thing in itself apart from this concept.” Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgement trans. James Creed Meredith, ed. Nicholas Walker (Oxford University Press, 2007), 229. 61. Wolfgang Schwarz, “Kant’s Categories of Reality and Existence,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 48, no. 2 (1987): 346. Kant explains that “[o]ur transcendental idealism, on the contrary, allows that the objects of outer intuition are real too, just as they are intuited in space, along with all alterations in time, just as inner sense represents them. For since space is already a form of that intuition that we call outer, and without objects in it there would be no empirical representation at all, we can and must assume extended beings in space as real; and it is precisely the same with time. Space itself, however, together with time, and, with both, all appearances,

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are not things, but rather nothing but representations, and they cannot exist at all outside our mind.” (A491-2/B520) An extensive and “medieval” analysis of the difference between real, existence/actuality is made by Heidegger: “Real is what belongs to res . . . what belongs to the what-content . . . extension is a reality of a natural body . . . regardless of whether the body actually exists or not. . . . Actual being or existence is something which must first be added to the essence. . . . Kant first demonstrated that actuality, being present-at-hand, is not a real predicate of a thing; that is, a hundred possible dollars do not in the least differ from a hundred real dollars according to their reality.” MartinHeidegger, What is a Thing?, trans. William Baynard Barton and Vera Deutsch (H. Regnery Company, 1967), 212–3. See also Martin Heidegger, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics (Indiana University Press, 1997), 61. 62. Kant did not think that synthetic a priori truths were conditioned by the transcendental notion of being: “The mathematical concept of a triangle I would construct, i.e., give in intuition a priori, and in this way I would acquire synthetic but rational cognition. However, if I am given the transcendental concept of a reality, substance, force, etc., it designates neither an empirical nor a pure intuition, but only the synthesis of empirical intuitions (which thus cannot be given a priori).” (A722/ B750) In the same spirit, however under a different approach, Axel Schmidt tries to show the affinity between Scotus and Kant, especially between Ding an sich to Haecceitas and through this means to open up Kant to a more realistic interpretation. See Axel Schmidt, “Scotus und Kant. Rationale Anti-Rationalisten,” Theologie und Glaube 89, no. 2 (1999). 63. If synthetic a priori truths are all existential truths of the will, then Kant’s transcendental system can be seen as belonging to the classic medieval tradition of the transcendentals of ens, res, unum, verum, bonum. Typically, these transcendentals are considered according to necessity, i.e., intellectively. But following Scotus, it can be said that the transcendental system gains its full rationality at the level of the will. That is the gist of the Kantian questioning, which presupposes the actuality of contingent principles that make experience possible. Putting it differently, we might say that intuition and concepts, without which no cognition is possible (B75), correspond to some degree with the two levels of the transcendental system: concepts pertain to the intellect and intuition to the will, so that a full cognition of a thing must combine both. If this is so, then the medieval transcendental system still resides within Kant’s transcendental system, but since it is focused on the question of possibility, the transcendentality is examined primarily in accordance with the will and less according to the intellect. For further reading see Ludger Honnefelder, “Metaphysics as a Discipline: From the ‘Transcendental Philosophy of the Ancients’ to Kant’s Notion of Transcendenta lPhilosophy,” in The Medieval Heritage in Early Modern Metaphysics and Modal Theory, 1400–1700 (Springer, 2003); Norbert Hinske, Kants Weg zur Transzendental philosophie: der dreissig jährige Kant (W. KohlhammerVerlag, 1970); Ignacio Angelelli, “On the Origins of Kant’s ‘Transcendental,’” Kant-Studien 63, no. 1–4 (1972); John P Doyle, “Between Transcendental and Transcendental: The Missing Link?,” The Review of Metaphysics (1997). Aertsen, Medieval Philosophy as Transcendental Thought: From Philip the Chancellor (ca. 1225) to Francisco Suárez, 107, 694.

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64. Lect.II, d. 3, p. 3, q. 1, n. 285 [16:338–39]. For further reading on Scotus’s doctrine of cognition see Cross, Duns Scotus’s Theory of Cognition; Dumont, “Theology as a Science and Duns Scotus’s Distinction between Intuitive and Abstractive Cognition.”; Sebastian J. Day, Intuitive Cognition: A Key to the Significance of the Later Scholastics (Franciscan Institute, 1947). 65. “As for the first grade, namely [intellective] intuitive cognition, whether it is in the intellect in this life, there is a doubt.” QM.II, q. 3, n. 111 [1:198]; Also: “But there is another act of understanding [i.e. intellective intuitive cognition], though we do not experience it in ourselves as certainty, but it is possible. It is knowledge precisely of a present object as present and of an existing object as certainty.” Despite these doubts, Scotus immediately maintains that we do have sensual intuitive cognition: “On the other hand, a sense power has such perfection in its knowledge, because it can attain an object in itself as existing and present in its real existence, and not just diminutively in a kind of imperfect likeness of itself. Therefore this perfection also pertains to an intellective power in the act of knowing. It could not pertain to it however unless it could know an existing thing and know it as present either in its own existence or in some intelligible object that contains the thing in question in an eminent way, which we are not concerned with at present.” Quodl. 6.19 [8], 136. Richard Cross also brings evidence from the Ordinatio to support this possibility of intellectual intuitive cognition in this lifetime: “The intellect not only cognizes universals (which is true of abstractiveintellection, about which the Philosopher speaks, because that alone is scientific), but also intuitively cognizes those things which the sense cognizes (because the more perfect and higher cognitive power in the same thing cognizes those things which the lower power does), and also cognizes sensations: and each of these is proved by this, that it knows contingently true propositions, and syllogizes from them; but forming propositions and syllogizing is proper to the intellect; the truth of those things is about the objects as intuitively cognized, namely, as existent—the same way in which they are known by the sense.” Ord. I, d. 45, q. 3, n. 137. Translation in Cross 2014, 45–46. 66. The scholarship is not conclusive on the matter. For a summary of the various opinions see Cross 2014, 50–52. 67. QM.II. q. 3, n. 112 [1:198]. 68. Ibid., n. 114 [1:198–99]. See also Day, Intuitive Cognition: A Key to the Significance of the Later Scholastics, 58. 69. Wolter1990b, 111. 70. The will which brings things into existence, is not itself seen, for it is the intellect that sees, and the intellect comprehends nothing but what is thinkable. Thus existence is perceived through the truths that accompany it. “But in this way of knowing there seems to be something discursive, as if the divine intellect, seeing the decision of the will, would see an aspect of the existence of a contingent thing only on further reflection. . . . [W]hen the will has decided for one component, that [component] has the aspect of being made and being produced. Then the intellect sees that proposition not by the fact that it sees the decision of the will, but its essence is then for itself the immediate ground of representing that proposition.” John Duns Scotus, Contingency and Freedom: John Duns Scotus LecturaI 39, ed. Norman Kretzmann, trans.

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Anthonie Jaczn Vosetal., The New Synthese Historical Library, (Dordrecht; Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1994), nn. 64–5. 71. The question arises: what is the difference between an existential truth that follows the self and existential truths that follow the grasp of things. Scotus’ answer might be that we can distinguish between two types of existential truths: 1. External, that things are conceived through synthetic a priori truth such as a triangle has 180°. 2. Internal, that the conceiver is grasped transcendentally as that who follows every act of conceiving (an extrapolation of Scotus’s discussion of memory in Ord.IV-A, d. 45, q. 3. 72. Ord. III, d. 14, q. 3, n. 113 [9:468–69]. 73. Wolter, “Intuition, Memory, and Knowledge of Individuals,” 116. 74. Ord. I, d. 3, p. 1, q. 3, n. 172 [3:106] 75. On the affirmation of the reality of reality See Liran Shia Gordon, “Sublating Rationality: The Eucharist as an Existential Trial,” European Journal of Philosophy of Religion 13, no. 3 (2021). 76. “The rose is without why; it blooms because it blooms. It pays no attention to itself, asks not whether it is seen.” Translation in Martin Heidegger, The Principle of Reason, trans. Reginald Lilly (Indiana University Press, 1996), 36.

CHAPTER 5 1.This chapter is based on Liran Shia Gordon, “On the Co-Nowness of Time and Eternity: a Scotistic Perspective,” International Journal of Philosophy and Theology (2016), ttps://doi.org/10.1080/21692327.2016.1158661. 2. Augustine, The Confessions, 242. 3. For further reading see William L. Craig, The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez, Brill’s Studies in Intellectual History, (Leiden; New York: Brill, 1988); Anthony Kenny, “Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom,”in Aquinas: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Anthony Kenny (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1976); Rory Fox, Time and Eternity in Mid-thirteenth-century Thought, Oxford Theological Monographs, (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); Harm Goris, Free Creatures of an Eternal God: Thomas Aquinas on God’s Infallible Foreknowledge and Irresistible Will, Thomas Instituut Utrecht, (Leuven: Peeters Publishers, 1996). 4. J. Ellis McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time,” Mind, no. 68 (1908): 464–65. 5. McTaggart, “The Unreality of Time,” 458. 6. Goris, Free Creatures of an Eternal God: Thomas Aquinas onGod’s Infallible Foreknowledge and Irresistible Will, 93. 7. See Liran Shia Gordon, “Some Thoughts about Aquinas’s Conception of Truth as Adequation,” The Heythrop Journal 57, no. 2 (2016), https://doi.org/10.1111/ heyj.12303. 8. AquinasSCG I, ch. 66, 4. 9. Aquinas De Veritate 2.12. See also SCG I, ch. 66, 7: “Hence, whatever is found in any part of time coexists with what is eternal as being present to it, although with

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respect to some other time it be past or future. Something can be present to what is eternal only by being present to the whole of it, since the eternal does not have the duration of succession. The divine intellect, therefore, sees in the whole of its eternity, as being present to it, whatever takes place through the whole course of time. And yet what takes place in a certain part of time was not always existent. It remains, therefore, that God has a knowledge of those things that according to the march of time do not yet exist.” 10. STH la.14.13. 11. SCGI, Ch. 66, 7. 12. SCGI, Ch. 1, 67, 2. 13. Richard Cross, “Duns Scotus on Eternity and Timelessness,” Faith and Philosophy 14, no. 1 (1997); Cross, The Physics of Duns Scotus, 214–56; Richard Cross, “Angelic Time and Motion: Bonaventure to Duns Scotus,” in A Companion to Angels in Medieval Philosophy, ed. Tobias Hoffman, Brill’s Companions to the Christian Tradition (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2012); Craig, The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez, 127–45; Wolter, “Scotus’ Paris Lectures on God’s Knowledge of Future Events.”; Pascal Massie, “Time and Contingency in Duns Scotus,”The Saint Anselm Journal 3 (2006); Neil Lewis, “Space and Time,” in The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus, ed. Thomas Williams (Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Olivier Boulnois, “Du temps cosmiqueà la durée ontologique? Duns Scot, le temps, l’aevumet l’éternité,” in The Medieval Concept of Time: Studies on the Scholastic Debate and its Reception in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Pasquale Porro, Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2001). 14. As Wolter explains in the above article, Scotus’s scholars have significant problems in determining Scotus’s genuine position. On the one hand, and thanks to the findings of Balić and the Scotistic commission, Scotus missing early Oxford commentary on the Sentences, the Lectura, was discovered and critically edited. However, the committee also concluded that the account given in the Wadding-Vivès editions is not a genuine account but rather represents a refined version of the position given in the Lectura. Wolter writes that “Since it exists insubstantially the same form in all the important manuscripts, however, they contend these must have stemmed from some single ‘apograph’ composed by some disciple who not only knew Scotus’s mind on this subject but had access to sources over and above his initial Lectura and the ‘examined report’ of his Paris lectures. Consequently, they have given us a critical edition of this apograph and included it in an appendix to fourth volume of the Vatican edition of the Ordinatio. Whether or not it represents his latest thought on the subject, the fact that Scotus did not incorporate it in his Ordinatio suggests he may not have been completely satisfied with his treatment.” Wolter, “Scotus’ Paris Lectures on God’s Knowledge of Future Events.” 285–6. Since this work does not presume to offer any solution to this historical conundrum, the Appendix will be used in order to exploit Scotistic insights. 15. See Ord. dd. 38–9, AppendixA, A—Opinio Prima, [7] ]4:406–07[. 16. Ord. I, dd. 38–9, Appendix A [4:409].

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17. Craig, The Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents from Aristotle to Suarez, 130. On this see Scotus remark on the “sitting down” in Appendix A [4:410]. 18. Ord. I, dd. 38–9, Appendix A [4:442]. 19. Massie, “Time and Contingency in Duns Scotus,” 20. See Lect. I, d. 39, qq. 1–5, n. 85 (XVII:507) 20. Ord. I, dd. 38–9, Appendix A [4:442]. 21. Ord. II, d. 2, nn. 99–101. [7:200–2]. 22. See Lect. I, d. 39, n. 17 [17: 484] as well as Rep. I-A, d. 38, n. 35 [2: 457]. For further reading on Scotus’s actual position see Duns Scotus, Contingency and Freedom; Wolter, “Scotus’s Paris Lectures on God’s Knowledge of Future Events.”; Eef Dekker, “Does Duns Scotus Need Molina? On Divine Foreknowledge and Cocausality,” in John Duns Scotus (1265/6–1308). Renewal of Philosophy. Acts of the third symposium organized by the Dutch society for medieval philosophy mediumaevum (May 23 and 24, 1996), elementa (Amsterdam: Atlanta Rodopi, 1998). 23. Lect. I, d. 39, n. 65 (XVII: 501). Translation from Duns Scotus, Contingency and Freedom, 146. 24. See for example William Lane Craig, “John Duns Scotus on God’s Foreknowledge and Future Contingents,” Franciscan studies 47 (1987); Dekker, “Does Duns Scotus Need Molina?” 25. Wolter, “Scotus’s Paris Lectures on God’s Knowledge of Future Events,” 286. 26. Stump and Kretzman define T/E/ET-simultaneity as follows: “T-simultaneity = existence or occurrence at one and the same time. . . . E-simultaneity = existence or occurrence at one and the same eternal present” Eleonore Stump and Norman Kretzmann, “Eternity,” The Journal of Philosophy 78, no. 8 (1981): 435, https://doi. org/10.2307/2026047. 27. Stump and Kretzmann, “Eternity,” 439. 28. Stump and Kretzmann, “Eternity.” 29. Cross, “Duns Scotus on Eternity and Timelessness,” 15. See Ord. I, d. 30, qq. 1–2, n. 51 [6:192] 30. Mark G. Henninger, Relations: Medieval Theories 1250–1325 (Oxford: New York: Clarendon Press and Oxford University Press, 1989), 68. 31. Cross, “Duns Scotus on Eternity and Timelessness,” 12. 32. See for example Paul Fitzgerald, “Stump and Kretzmann on Time and Eternity,” The Journal of Philosophy (1985), https://doi.org/10.2307/2026491; Brian Leftow, Time and Eternity (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1991). 33. Modern philosophers, such as Heidegger, would reverse this by claiming that the eternal now is derived from our fleeting now. This however calls into question the notion of truth which presupposes its immutability. Thus, finding a way to hold together both eternity and the fleeting temporality is motivated by the need to reconcile eternal truths and our temporality and freedom. 34. Quodl., 16.13 [372]. See also Ord. IV-A, d. 43, q. 4, n. 2; RepI-A, d. 10, q. 3, n. 54; QM.IX, q. 15, nn. 21–22 [2:608]. For further reading on the matter see GonzálezAyesta, “Scotus’s Interpretation of Metaphysics 9.2: On the Distinction between

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Nature and Will,” 218. And Hoffmann, “The Distinction Between Nature and Will in Duns Scotus.” 35. Lect. II, dd. 34–37, n. 34 [19:332]. For a discussion of Scotus’s conception of sin as forbidden willing see Antonie Vos, The Theology of John Duns Scotus (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2018), 253–58. 36. Vos remarks thay the possibility of sinning “does not belong to the definition of freedom.” And yet, the fact that we can sin manifests our freedom. Vos, The Theology of John Duns Scotus, 255–56. 37. Gloria Frost, “John Duns Scotus on God’s Knowledge of Sins: A Test-Case for God’s Knowledge of Contingents,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 48, no. 1 (2010), https://doi.org/10.1353/hph.0.0184. 38. Ord. II, d. 37, q. 5 39. Ord. II, d. 37, n. 97 [7: 408–9]. Also Wolter, “Scotus’s Paris Lectures on God’s Knowledge of Future Events,” 317. 40. Ord. II, d. 37, nn. 120–24 (VIII: 418–9). See Allan B. Wolter, “William of Alnwick on Scotus and Divine Concurrence,”in Scotus and Ockham: Selected Essays, ed. Allan B Wolter (St. Bonaventure, N.Y: Franciscan Institute, 2003), 102–12; Frost, “John Duns Scotus on God’s Knowledge of Sins: A Test-Case for God’s Knowledge of Contingents,” 25; Wolter, “Scotus’s Paris Lectures on God’s Knowledge of Future Events,” 323–25. 41. Whereas the Reportatio (lecture report written by a student) on the first book of the Sentences was checked and supervised by Scotus, Reportatio II-IV were not examined and thus do not carry the same weight of approvance. See T. Williams, The Cambridge companion to Duns Scotus (Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003). http://books.google.com/books?id=VRV9Tr_A-98C; Vos, The Philosophy of John Duns Scotus, 65. 42. Reportatio II-A, d. 46, q. 2, §3 (Waddingeditionvol. XI). See Frost 30–31. 43. William A. Frank, “Duns Scotus on autonomous freedom and divine co-causality,” Medieval Philosophy & Theology 2 (1992): 154. 44. Ord. II, d. 37, q. 5, nn. 117–18. See also Wolter, “Scotus’s Paris Lectures on God’s Knowledge of Future Events,” 322–23; Frank, “Duns Scotus on autonomous freedom and divine co-causality,” 154–55. See Ord. I, d. 3, n. 496 [3:293–4]. 45. E.g., Ord. I, d. 3, nn. 498–500, 511, 523, 563 [3:294–7, 303, 311–2, 335]. 46. Frank, “Duns Scotus on autonomous freedom and divine co-causality,” 155–56. 47. Aristotle Physics 4.11.219b 1-2. 48. See Lect. I, d. 39, nn. 50–1 [17:495–56]: “at the same moment the will has an act of willing, at the same and for the same moment it can have an opposite act of willing . . . Likewise, at that moment at which it elicits an act of willing, the will is prior by nature in regard to its volition and is freely related to it. Hence it is contingently related to willing and has a contingent relation to not-willing at that moment at which it elicits a volition; . . . We must distinguish thecomposite and the divided sense. It is false in the composite sense, as we understand the predicate to be attributed to this whole: the will willing at a, together with the possibility operator. . . . but it is true in the divided sense because there are two propositions, because it implicitly includes two propositions. In one proposition the will is said to have the act of willing,

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and in the other one the will is said to have the opposite act taken on its own with the possibility operator, and then the meaning is: The will is willing at a and The will can be not-willing at a.” Translation from Duns Scotus, Contingency and Freedom. 49. This futural manifold is determined only at the level of the “divine” will. For the level of the intellect determines the manifold of any possible world whereas the future refers to a specific world, i.e., to a world that was willed among other possible worlds. 50. Brian Leftow, “God’s Impassibility, Immutability, and Eternality,” in Oxford Handbook of Aquinas, ed. Brian David and Eleonore Stump (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 181. 51. These macro and micro perspective and the math behind them is explain, for example, by Markov Chians and Bayesian network. For further reading see Stuart Russell and Peter Norvig, Artificial Intelligence: A Modern Approach, 3rd ed. (Harlow: Pearson, 2016).

CHAPTER 6 1. This chapter is based on Liran Shia Gordon, “‘All is Foreseen, and Freedom of Choice is Granted’: A Scotistic Examination of God’s Freedom, Divine Foreknowledge and the Arbitrary Use of Power,” The Heythrop Journal early view (2017), https://doi.org/10.1111/heyj.12819, http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ heyj.12819/full. 2. Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov, trans. A. MacAndrew (New York: Bantam Classic, 1984), 871. This definition essentially follows Thrasymachus’s definition of justice that Plato presents in his Republic I: “I say that justice is nothing other than the advantage of the stronger.” Plato, “Republic,” in Plato: complete works, ed. J. M. Cooper and D. S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis, Cambridge: Hackett, 1997), 983 (383c). 3. Rep.I-A, d. 44, q. 2 4. Thomas Williams, “A Most Methodical Lover?: On Scotus’'s Arbitrary Creator,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 38, no. 2 (2005): 193–95. 5. Anselm, Monologion and Proslogion: with the replies of Gaunilo and Anselm, trans. Thomas Williams (Indianapolis, Indiana: Hackett Publishing, 1996), 29. 6. John Sanders, The God Who Risks: A Theology of Providence (InterVarsity Press, 1998), 199–200. 7. On the different possible risk-taking models, see Sanders, The God Who Risks, 195–200. A similar discussion, though with different terminology, is carried in William Hasker, “A Philosophical Perspective,” in The Openness of God (Downers Grove: InterVarsity, 1994), 134–35; James K Beilby and Paul R. Eddy, Divine Foreknowledge: Four Views (InterVarsity Press, 2009). 8. For further reading on modern proponents of Molina’s view see e.g.,Thomas P. Flint, DivineProvidence: The Molinist Account (Cornell University Press, 1998); William L. Craig, The Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom (Grand Rapids, Mich: Baker Book House, 1987).

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9. W. Norris Clarke, God, Knowable and Unknowable, ed. Robert J. Roth (New York: Fordham University, 1973), 65. 10. Ord.I, dd. 38–9, Appendix A, Opinio Secunda [4:409]. 11. Craig reaches a similar conclusion: “Space-time is not for him a timelessly existing ‘block’—future space-time positions not only do not now exist; they do not exist, period. . . . it follows that God cannot have knowledge of future contingents.” Craig, “John Duns Scotus on God’s Foreknowledge and Future Contingents,” 102. 12. Scotus’s opposition to Aquinas’s view can be exemplified in his consideration of the manner in which Christ understands. The main problem Scotus highlights is that innate intelligible species, which Aquinas uses to explain Christ’s understanding, do not represent things in their existence, and so one needs an alternative kind of cognition to attain contingent knowledge of things. This he calls intuitive cognition that grasps “a thing insofar as it is present in itsownexistence.”Lect.II, d. 3, p. 3, q. 1, n. 285 (16:338–39). Ord. III, d. 14, n. 113 (IX:468–69). Furthermore, and without elaborating, this seems to answer Scotus’s problem of divine immutability and support the rejection Scotus’s view of divine foreknowledge presented in Lect. I, d. 39. 13. Luis De Molina, On Divine Foreknowledge: part IV of the Concordia, trans. Alfred J. Freddoso (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 168–70. David Basinger presents different views that reject definite knowledge of future outcomes, what he calls non paradox indeterminists. As I see it, Molina’s doctrine of middle knowledge, promoted primarily by Craig, holds that God knows how each creature will act as a free agent in every situation. Though creatures act freely, God has perfect divine foreknowledge. Craigwrites: “Since [a God with middle knowledge] knows what any free creature would do in any situation, he can, by creating the appropriate situations, bring it about that creatures will achieve his ends and purposes and that they will do so freely . . . . In his infinite intelligence, God is able to plan a world in which his designs are achieved by creatures acting freely.” (Craig, 135) I consider this view nonsensical. Either one has freedom and then one by definition acts in a contingent manner, or not. Scotus holds that there is one case whereby something, though it acts according to freedom, acts out of necessity, and that is the spiration of the Holy Spirit by the Father and Son. But this necessitation is a product of the infinity of the divine essence and its power. Here, in the case of creaturely affairs, such free necessitation is utterly groundless. See David Basinger, “Divine Control and Human Freedom: Is Middle Knowledge the Answer?” Journal of the Evangelical Theological Society36 (1993): 57–59; Craig, The Only Wise God: The Compatibility of Divine Foreknowledge and Human Freedom. 14. QM.IX, ch. 15, nn. 21–22 [2:608]. 15. Peter Geach presents a similar view, picturing God as a master chess player whose “knowledge of the game already embraces all the possible variant lines of play.” See Peter Geach, Providence and Evil: the Stanton Lectures 1971–2 (Cambridge UniversityPress, 1977), 58. A similar view can be found in Richard E. Creel, Divine Impassibility: An essay in philosophical theology (Wipf and Stock Publishers, 2005), 20–21. See also Sanders, The God Who Risks, 196–97. William Hasker, God, Time, and Knowledge (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1989), v; William Hasker, “An Open Theist Theodicy of Natural Evil,” in Molinism: the

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contemporary debate, ed. Ken Perszyk (Oxford University Press, 2011); Sanders, The God Who Risks. 16. Ethics of the Fathers (PirkeiAvot), 3.15. The original meaning was probably “All be observed, and freedom of choice is granted.” However, the word used in Hebrew, Tzafui, is typically understood as foreseen and not be observed, and so it was traditionally interpreted. 17. Ord. III (suppl.) d. 19; cod. Assisi com. 137, fol. 161v; ed. Vivès (Parisiis, 1894) XIV, 714. Translated by Juniper B Carol, Why Jesus Christ? Thomistic, Scotistic and Conciliatory Perspectives (Manassas, Virginia: Trinity Communications, 1986), 124–25. 18. John Feinberg, “God Ordains All Things,” in Predestination & Free Will: Four Views of Divine Sovereignty & Human Freedom, ed. David Basinger and Randall Basinger (Downers Grove: InterVarsity Press, 1986), 23–24. 19. See e.g., Ord. I, d. 10, 47–49 [4:359–60]. 20. In tertio praedestina vitaliquos ad gloriamet gratiam, et circa aliquos habuit actum negativum, non praedestinando. 21. Lect. I, d. 39, n. 65 (XVII: 501). Trans. from Duns Scotus, Contingency and Freedom. 22. Scotus explains that it cannot be that God attains new knowledge, for this contradicts divine foreknowledge “because there is nothing in him that is new –otherwise he would be changed.” Rep. I-A, d. 38, n. 36 [2:457]. As I showed in my treatment of divine impassibility, it is possible to maintain that God can have passions and yet this does not imply that this passion compels him to act; in a similar way it can be claimed that, in determinedly not determining, any future and contingent determination does not imply a real change in God. Following a similar line of argument by Aquinas, who explains in ST 1.19.7 that “[t]he will of God is altogether immutable. But notice in this connection that changing one’s will is different from willing a change in things,” Morris explains that “there would be no change in God’s intentions, just a change with regard to which of his immemorial intention she would in fact enact. And this would be wholly due to their conditional form, not to any change of mind on God’s part.” See Thomas V. Morris, “Properties, Modalities, and God,” The Philosophical Review 93, no. 1 (1984): 48. 23. [H]e who wills in an orderly manner would seem to intend first the glory of the one he wishes to be near the end, and thus he wills glory for this soul [of Christ] before he wills glory for any other soul. Ord. III, d. 7, q. 3, n. 58 [9:284–85]. Translated by Carol, Why Jesus Christ?, 122–23. 24. And in this respect, to answer theological concerns, the immaculate conception of Mary, though predestined, is contingent on different historical outcomes, and so is responsive to whether or not Adam’s sin was to happen and be transmitted. 25. Opus Parisiense, Lib. III, d. 7, q. 4; ed. Balic, 13–15. Translated by Carolin Why Jesus Christ,p. 126. 26. For further reading on this well studied topic see: Carl Feckes, Die Rechtfertigungslehredes Gabriel Biel undihre Stellunginner halb der nominalistischen Schule (Aschendorff, 1925); Heinrich Grzondziel, Die Entwicklung der Unterscheidungz wischen der potentia Dei absoluta und der potentia Deiordinata von Augustin bis

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Alexander von Hales (Druckerei Rosinsky, 1926); Paul Vignaux, Justification et prédestination au XI Vesiècle: DunsScot, Pierred Auriole, Guillaumed Occam, Grégoirede Rimini (Paris: E. Leroux, 1934); Heiko Oberman, The Harvest of Medieval Theology (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963); William J. Courtenay, “The Dialectic of Omnipotence in the High and Late Middle Ages,” in Divine Omniscience and Omnipotence in Medieval Philosophy, ed. Tamar Rudavsky (Springer, 1985); William J. Courtenay, Capacity and Volition: A History of the Distinction of Absolute and Ordained Power (1990); Amos Funkenstein, Theology and the Scientific Imagination: From the Middle Ages to the Seventeenth Century (Princeton University Press, 1986); Hester Goodenough Gelber, It Could Have Been Otherwise: Contingency and Necessity in Dominican Theology at Oxford, 1300–1350, vol. 81, Studien und Texte zur Geistesgeschichte des Mittelalters, (Leiden; Boston: Brill, 2004); Gijsbert Van Den Brink, Almighty God: A Study of the Doctrine of Divine Omnipotence, vol. 7 (Kampen: Kok Pharos, 1993); Kenneth Pennington, The Prince and the Law, 1200–1600: Sovereignty and Rights in the Western Legal Tradition (University of California Press, 1993); Eugenio Randi, “La vergine e il papa: Potentia Dei absoluta e plenitudo potestatis papalenel XIV secolo,” History of Political Thought 5 (1984); E. Randi, “A Scotist Way of Distinguishing between God’s Absolute and Ordained Powers,” in From Ockham to Wyclifed. A. Hudson and M. Wilks (NewYork: Oxford, 1987). 27. The traditional view can be exemplified in Aquinas: “For even as the divine goodness is made manifest through these things that are and through this order of things, so could it be made manifest through other creatures and another order. Therefore the divine will without prejudice to his goodness, justice and wisdom, can extend to other things besides those which he has made. . . . It is clear then that God absolutely can do otherwise than he has done. Since, however, he cannot make contradictories to be true at the same time, it can be said ex suppositione that God cannot make other things besides those he has made.” De Potentia Dei, q. 1, a. 5. Internet Version. Translated by the English Dominican Fathers Westminster, Maryland: The Newman Press, 1952, reprint of 1932 28. Ord. I, d. 44, n. 7 [6:366]: “For God can do anything that is not self-contradictory or act in any way that does not include a contradiction (and there are many such ways he could act); and then he is said to be acting according to his absolute power.” Trans. from Will and Morality, 257. More on the development of the legal usage of the distinction see Pennington, The Prince and the Law, 1200–1600: Sovereignty and Rights in the Western Legal Tradition, ch. 2. 29. Ord. I, d. 44, n. 3, [4:363–64]. Wolter’s translation from Will and Morality, 254–55. Similar and less elaborated version can be found in the same place at his Lectura. 30. See for example the unfavorable opinion in Courtenay, Capacity and Volition. 31. See end note 278. 32. Ordinatio I, d. 44, nn. 4–8. Translation from Allan B. Wolter, Duns Scotus on the Will and Morality (Washington Catholic University America Press1986), 255–57. http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=phl&AN=PHL1144525&sit e=ehost-live.

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33. Rep. I-A, d. 44, q. 2 34. Allan B. Wolter, “The UnshreddedScotus: A Response to Thomas Williams,” Journal Article, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 77, no. 3 (2003), http:// search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=phl&AN=PHL1774269&site=eh ost-live. 35. Mary Elizabeth Ingham, “Scotus and the Moral Order,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 67, no. 1 (1993). 36. “[J]ust as beauty is not some absolute quality in a beautiful body, but a combination of all that is in harmony with such a body (such as size, figure, and color), and a combination of all aspects (that pertain to all that is agreeable to such a body and are in harmony with one another), so the moral goodness of an act is a kind of decoration it has, including a combination of due pro­portion to all to which it should be proportioned (such as potency, object, end, time, place and manner), and this especially as right rea­son dictates.”Ord. I, d. 17, n. 62[5:163–64]. In Will and Morality, 207. See also Ingham, “Scotus and the Moral Order,”137. 37. Williams, “A Most Methodical Lover?” 193–95. 38. Quodl. 18.8, 18.16 [400, 404]. 39. For example, Donald Rutherford explains in the chapter The Maximization of Perfection and Harmony that “in bringing into existence the best of all possible worlds, God is first and foremost motivated to create that world which contains the greatest metaphysical goodness, in the sense of the greatest perfection or ‘'quantity of essence.’ Donald Rutherford, Leibniz and the Rational Order of Nature (Cambridge; New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 25. 40. This requires a computation capacity which is intensively uncountable infinite. 41. See for instance John Haldane, “Voluntarism and Realism in Medieval Ethics,” Journal of Medical Ethics 15, no. 1 (1989): 39. 42. Williams address the rational that support Wolter’s claim in Thomas Williams, “The Unmitigated Scotus,” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 80, no. 2 (1998): 178-79. [1]. Ord. I, d. 8, pars 2, n. 299 [5 4:324 f.]. 43. Ord. I, d. 8, pars 2, n. 299 [5 4:324 f.]. 44. Ord. II, d. 6, q. 2, nn. 49–51 [8:49–51]. For further reading see Peter King, “Scotus’s Rejection of Anselm,” in Johannes Duns Scotus 1308–2008: investigations into his philosophy Quadruple Congress, ed. Hannes Möhleetal. (Münster; St. Bonaventure, NY: Aschendorff Verlag; Franciscan Institute Publications, 2010), 368–70. 45. Williams, “A Most Methodical Lover?,” 175. 46. . Williams, “A Most Methodical Lover?,” 176, 86. 47. Rep. I-A, d. 44, q. 2 48. Rep. II, d. 6, q. 2, n. 10. Quoting from Williams in Thomas Williams, “From Metaethics to Action Theory,” in The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus, ed. Thomas Williams (Cambridge, U.K.; New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 346. 49. Thomas Williams, “How Scotus Separates Morality from Happiness,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 69, no. 3 (1995): 438. Some will conclude, like Michael Bergmann, that such a position leads us into epistemic blindness both as to

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what is good and what is evil and thus that any attempt to make this world better is futile. See Michael Bergmann, “Might-Counterfactuals, Transworld Untrustworthiness and Plantinga’s Free Will Defence,” Faith and Philosophy 16, no. 3 (1999); Hasker, “An Open Theist Theodicy of Natural Evil,” 286–87. 50. Norman Kretzmann, “Abraham, Isaac, and Euthyphro: God and the basis of morality,” in Philosophy of Religion, The Big Questions, Malden, ed. Eleonore Stump and Michael J. Murray (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 423. 51. Paul Helm, “Eternal God: a Study of God without Time,” (2010): 176.

CHAPTER 7 1. The question of Christs two natures was, as is well known, debated extensively by the early Fathers and was determined by the Creed of Chalcedon: “We . . . teach men to confess . . . Jesus Christ . . . truly God and truly man, of a reasonable soul and body . . . to be acknowledged in two natures, inconfusedly, unchangeably, indivisibly, inseparably; the distinction of natures being by no means taken away by the union, but rather the property of each nature being preserved, and concurring in one Person and one Subsistence, not parted or divided into two persons, but one and the same . . . .” translated by Philip Schaff, Creeds of Christendom (Harper & Brothers, 1877), 62–63. There were of course many who rejected it, e.g.,Severus of Antioch who founded anti-Chalcedonian Syriac Orthodox Church. For further reading on Severus see Yonatan Moss, Incorruptible Bodies: Christology, Society, and Authority in Late Antiquity, vol. 1 (University of California Press, 2016). 2. Paul Gondreau, The Passions of Christ’s Soul in the Theology of St. Thomas Aquinas (Scranton: University of Scranton Press, 2009); Robert C. Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the Passions: A Study of Summa Theologiae: 1a2ae 22–48 (Cambridge, UK: New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009); Thomas G. Weinandy, Does God Suffer? (University of Notre Dame Press, 2000). See also Nicholas E. Lombardo, The Logic of Desire: Aquinason Emotion (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2011); Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of Summa Theologiae, 1a75–89 (Cambridge University Press, 2002); Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge: New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); James F. Keating and Thomas Joseph White, Divine Impassibility and the Mystery of Human Suffering (Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing, 2009); Jürgen Moltmann, The Crucified God: The Cross of Christas the Foundation and Criticism of Christian Theology (Augsburg: Fortress, 1993); Sanders, The God Who Risks, chapter 5. 3. For further reading on the historical development of the passions, see Simo Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: New York: Oxford University Press, 2004); Emotions and Choice from Boethius to Descartes, ed. Henrik Lagerlund and Mikko Yrjönsuuri, Boston: Mass., (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2002); Richard Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: from Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation (Oxford: NewYork: Oxford University Press, 2000); Sarah C. Byers, “Augustine and the Cognitive Cause of Stoic ‘Preliminary Passions’

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(Propatheiai),” The Journal of the History of Philosophy 41, no. 4 (2003); Thomas Dixon, From Passions to Emotions: The Creation of a Secular Psychological Category (Cambridge: New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, “Aristotle on the Metaphysical Status of Pathe,” The Review of Metaphysics 37, no. 3 (1984). 4. Hilary writes: “The man Jesus Christ . . . without ceasing to be Himself, that is, God, took true humanity after the likeness of our humanity. . . . our Lord Jesus Christ suffered blows, hanging, crucifixion and death: but the suffering which attacked the body of the Lord, without ceasing to be suffering, had not the natural effect of suffering. It exercised its function of punishment with all its violence; but the body of Christ by its virtue suffered the violence of the punishment, without its consciousness. . . . He had a body to suffer, and He suffered: but He had not a nature which could feel pain.” Hilary of Poitiers, “On the Trinity,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, ed. Schaff and Wace (Buffalo, NY: Christian Literature Publishing), bk. 10, ch. 23. Similarly, he writes: “Although these kinds of suffering affect the weakness of the flesh, yet God the Word, made flesh, could not become changeable by suffering. Indeed, although the Word that was made flesh subjected himself to the passion, he nevertheless was not changed by the passibility of suffering. For he was able to suffer, and yet was not able to be passible, because passibility pertains to a weak nature; but passion is the bearing of those things which are inflicted.” Hilary, De synodis, n. 49, quoted by Peter Lombard, “The Sentences Book 3: On the Incarnation of the Word,” (Edited by Giulio Silano. Ontario: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 2008), 65. 5. Theödor Foerster, “Zur theologiedes Hilarius,” Theologische Studien and Kritiken 61 (1888): 662. 6. John of Damascus, “An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,” in Writings, The Fathers of the Church (Catholics University of America Press, 1958), 323–4. 7. Damascus, “An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,” 331. 8. Damascus, “An Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith,” 324. 9. III Sent., d. 15, ch. 2. (III: 327–28) Bonaventura, Opera Omnia (Quaracchi 1882–1902). Translation mine. 10. Richard Sorabji discusses extensively the historical development of propassions and particularly in Jerome. See Sorabji, Emotion and Peace of Mind: from Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation, 343–56. 11. Gondreau, The Passions of Christ’s Soul, 368. 12. Aquinas, Questiones Disputataede Veritate, 26.1, Henry Regnery Company 1952–4, trans. Mulligan, McGlynn and Schmidt. See also Miner, Thomas Aquinas on the passions: a study of Summa theologiae: 1a2ae 22–48, 31–32; Craig Steven Titus, “Passions in Christ: Spontaneity, development, and virtue,”TheThomist 73, no. 1 (2009): 62–64. 13. ST I-II, q. 22, a. 1, Benziger Bros. edition, 1947, Trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province. See also de Veritate 26. 14. ST I-II, q. 22, a. 1, ad. 1. 15. QDV26.2. 16. See Paul Gondreau, “The Passions and the Moral Life: Appreciating the Originality of Aquinas,” The Thomist 71, no. 3 (2007): 426–30; Servais Pinckaers,

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“Reappropriating Aquinas’s Account of the Passions,” in The Pinckaers Reader: Renewing Thomistic Moral Theology, ed. John Berkman and Craig Steven Titus (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2005), 275–79. See also that Bonaventure and Scotus reject this view in their commentaries on dist. 33 of the Lombard’s book III of the sentences. 17. ST I-II, q. 22, a. 3, ad. 3. 18. Mt26:37. Vulgate: “Et ad sumpto Petro et duo bus filiis Zebedaeico epit contristariet maestusesse.” See Gondreau, The Passions of Christ’s Soul. 370–2. 19. ST III, q. 15, a. 4. 20. See Olivier Boulnois, “Duns Scot: existe-t-ildes passions de la volonté?” in Les Passions antiques et médiévales, ed. Besnier, Moreau, and Renault (Paris: PUF, 2003); Knuuttila, Emotions in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy; Simo Knuuttila, “The Psychology of the Incarnation in John Duns Scotus,” in Philosophy and Theology in the Long Middle Ages: A Tribute to Stephen F. Brown, ed. Stephen F Brown et al. (Leiden/Boston: Brill, 2011); Dominik Perler, “Duns Scotus über Schmerz und Traurigkeit,” in Johannes Duns Scotus 1308–2008, ed. Honnefelder (St. Bonaventure, NY: Aschendorff, 2010); Ian Drummond, “John Duns Scotus on the Passions of the Will,” in Emotion and Cognitive Life in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy ed. Pickavé and Shapiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). 21. ST III, q. 1, a. 3. 22. Ord. III, d. 7, q. 3, n. 58 [9:284–85]. Translated by Carol, Why Jesus Christ?, 122–3. 23. Ibid., n. 69 [9:289]. 24. Trent Pomplun, “The Immaculate World: Predestination and Passibility in Contemporary Scotism,” Modern Theology 30, no. 4 (2014): 532. 25. See Francis Xavier Pancheri, The Universal Primacy of Christ, trans. Juniper B. Carol (Christendom Publications, 1983), 20. 26. Ordinatio, III (suppl.) d. 19; cod. Assisicom. 137, fol. 161v; ed.Vivès (Parisiis, 1894) XIV, 714. Translation from Why Jesus Christ?, p. 125. 27. Jürgen Moltmann, The Trinity and the Kingdom: The Doctrine of God (Fortress Press, 1981)., 114–5. 28. See Delio, A Franciscan View of Creation: Learning to Live in a Sacramental World, 33–34. 29. Pancheri, The Universal Primacy of Christ, 37. 30. This follows Anselm’s doctrine of satisfaction as was presented in his Cur Deus homo. 31. Ord. IV-A, d. 49, q. 7, §5, Wadding10, 495. It is important to note that this text cannot be found in the new critical edition since it is missing from the A manuscript, also known as the “Assisi Manuscript.” This however does not imply that it is not authentic. 32. Ord. III, d. 15, n. 47 [9:498]. 33. Ord. III, d. 15, n. 49 [9:499–500]. See also n. 50 [9:500]. 34. Ord. III, d. 34, q. 1, n. 48 [10:199–200]. 35. “This passion is not in the will by its own effect, because then it would be immediately under the power of the will, just as volitions and nolitions are under the

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power of the will. But this is false; for if one nills, and that which was nilled happens, one does not seem to have sadness immediately under one’s power; for if the will was its efficient cause, then it would be its own operation, just as ‘to will’ is caused by it and is within it.” Ibid. 36. Augustine, Enchiridion ad Laurentium c. 86, quoted in Lect. I, d. 10, n. 25 [17:123–24]. 37. Richard Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation: Thomas Aquinas to Duns Scotus (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), Ch. 9. 38. Scotus, Ord. III, d. 1. q. 1, n. 14 [9:5–6]. 39. Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation, 206. 40. Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation, 207. 41. Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation, 210. 42. Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation, 214. 43. Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation. 44. QM.IX, ch.15, n. 73 [2:624–25]. 45. Ibid., n. 38 [2:612–13]. 46. Ibid., n. 61 [2:621]. 47. Cross, The Metaphysics of the Incarnation, 214. 48. From the Creed of Chalcedon. Translated by Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, 62–63. 49. QM. IX, ch.15, n. 73 [2:624–25]. 50. Rep. II, 34, 3 (Vivès23:170). See in Wolter, The Transcendentals and their Function in the Metaphysics of Duns Scotus, 121. 51. Ibid. See also Quodl., q. 18, 9 [3] in Felix Alluntis and Allan B. Wolter, God and creatures: the Quodlibetal questions (Washington: CUA, 1975), 400–1. And Ord. IV-A, d. 31, q. 1, n. 4 (Vivès, XIX:304). 52. Rep. II. q. 2, a. 34, n. 3. [Vivès23:170]. Trans. from Wolter, The Transcendentals and their Function in the Metaphysics of Duns Scotus, 122. 53. Creed of Chalcedon, translated by Schaff, Creeds of Christendom, 62–3.

CHAPTER 8 1. This chapter is based on Liran Shia Gordon, “Causality and Becoming: Scotistic Reflections,” The Heythrop Journal 60, no. 1 (2019),https://doi.org/https://doi. org/10.1111/heyj.13058. 2. For further discussion of the Aristotelian and Medieval discussion of causes, and the difference between them, see Jakob Leth Fink, “Introduction,” in Suárez on Aristotelian Causality (Brill, 2015), 6–17. 3. Following Aristotle, Aquinas defines final causality in the following way: “And since, as Aristotle says in book 2 of the Metaphysics, everything that acts, acts only by intending something, there must be some fourth thing: namely, that which is intended by that which is acting. And this is said to be the end.” ThomasAquinas, Deprincipiis naturae 3.351, in Opuscula Philosophica, ed. R.M. Spiazzi (Turin and Rome, 1954), 123.

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4. Material causality is discussed in disputations 13–14 in his Metaphysical Disputations, formal causality in 15–16, efficient causality in 17–22, and final causality in 23–24. 5. Thomas Aquinas, De principiis naturae 3.352, in Opuscula Philosophica, ed. R.M. Spiazzi (Turin and Rome, 1954), 124. See also Suarez’s Metaphysical Disputations 17.1.6. 6. Thomas M. Tuozzo, “Aristotle and the Discovery of Efficient Causation,”in Efficient Causation: A History, ed. Tad M Schmaltz, Oxford Philosophical Concepts (NY: Oxford, 2014), 25. 7. Aristotle, Physics 243a 33-34. 8. Tuozzo, “Aristotle and the Discovery of Efficient Causation,” 25. 9. Rep. IV-A, d. 1, q. 1, n. 28 [1:9–10]. 10. QM.IX, q. 14, nn. 58–59 [2:580]. 11. Tuozzo, “Aristotle and the Discovery of Efficient Causation,” 25–26. 12. Ord. I, d. 1, q. 5, n. 182 [2:121]. See also Ord. I, d. 8, p. 2, n. 240 [4:289]; Ord. I, d. 2, p. 1, qq. 1–2, n. 892:80–81; QM.V, q. 1, n. 20, 26 [1:347–48]. 13. See De Primo Principio, 2.29–30; See also QM.V, q. 1, nn. 54–59 [1:354–55]. 14. Tad M. Schmaltz, “Introduction,” in Efficient Causation: A History, ed. Tad M Schmaltz, Oxford Philosophical Concepts (NY: Oxford, 2014), 7. 15. Ockham, Opera theologicaI X, 299–300. Ockham follows Scotus’s definition of natural active potency: “the potency of itself is determined to act, so that so far as itself is concerned, it cannot fail to act when not impeded from without.” QM.IX, q. 15, nn. 21–22 [2:608] 16. Henrik Lagerlund, “The Unity of Efficient and Final Causality: the Mind/ Body Problem Reconsidered,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 19, no. 4 (2011): 593. 17. Scotus says similar things in Ord. I, d. 3, p. 3, n. 525 [3:313]. However, the necessity that is presumed does not speak of necessity in the strong sense, i.e., as one whose opposites are contradictory, but rather as necessary to an ordained system but that could have been ordained otherwise. In a recent study Löwe discusses Scotus’s distinction between intrinsic and extrinsic respects. Whereas in intrinsic respects a respect exists necessarily if its extremes exist (e.g., if two things are red then they are similar in respect to their color), extrinsic respects do not necessarily exist when extremes exist. Löwe’s example is “you can have the fire and the wood, even in close proximity, and yet no action [/passion] of burning, say, because the wood is wet.” The important point for our argument is that the burning depends on something external to the of wood or fire and could easily be different in another possible world. See Can Laurens Löwe, “John Duns Scotus versus Thomas Aquinas on action-passion identity,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy early view (2018): 13. 18. Rep. I-A, dd. 39–40, qq.1–3, nn. 25, 27 [2:471–72]. 19. Rep. I-A, d. 2, p. 1, q. 1, n. 32 [2:123–24]. 20. This follows Scotus’s distinction between potentiadei ordinata and potentiadei absoluta, i.e., when one acts in conformity with an ordained law or when one acts “beyond or against such a law, and in this case its absolute power exceeds its ordained power.” Ord. I, d. 44, n. 3 [4:363–64]. Wolter’s translation from Wolter, Duns Scotus

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on the Will and Morality 254–55. This, as is well noted in the vast literature, stands in opposition to the common understanding of the distinction between this world as it was actually ordained versus the set of possible worlds out of which God picked this one. For further reading see Courtenay, Capacity and Volition. 21. QM. IX, q.15, nn. 21–22 [2:608]. This typeof causality is equivalent to another ‘type’ of physics that is moving from the past to the future and from the future to the past in an asymmetricaly et complementary manner. Whereas classical mechanics is moving deterministically from the past to the future, and thus there is no essential difference between the two, quantum mechanics is sensitive to the asymmetry between the two—and the need to give a sort of causal account to the contingent determination of the future. 22. It is possible to translate Scotus’s qualification of the distinction between potentiadei absoluta and potentia deiordinata to distinguish between situations where the will can or cannot influence the determination of the future. Scotus distinguishes between situations where one has the power to exceed the ordained situation and effect his own desire upon the given (translation: where the will can influence the future), and where one is subjugated to the given situation without the power to use his will to alter the outcome of things (translation: where the will cannot influence the future): “But when that upright law—according to which an agent must act in order to act ordinately—is not in the power of that agent, then its absolute power cannot exceed its ordained power in regard to any object without it acting disorderly or inordinately. . . . But whenever the law and its rectitude are in the power of the agent, so that the law is right only because it has been established, then the agent can freely order things otherwise than this right law dictates and still can act orderly, because he can establish another right or just law according to which he may act orderly. . . . And therefore such an agent can act otherwise, so that he establishes another upright law.” Ord. I, d. 44, nn. 4–5, 8. [6:364–66]. 23. Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics, trans. John P. Rowan (Chicago: Regnery 1961), 5.2.775. 24. Ord. I, d. 1, q. 2, n. 78 [2:59–60]. See alsoOrd. I, d. 2, q. 1, n. 57 [2:163]; See also QM.V, q. 1, n. 39 [1:351]. 25. QM.V, q. 1, n. 77 [1:357]. 26. Giorgio Pini argues that the first sin of Lucifer might be the result of a wish. SeeGiorgioPini, “What Lucifer Wanted: Anselm, Aquinas, and Scotus on the Object of the First Evil Choice,” Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy 1 (2013). 27. It is needless to say that ‘our’ Sarah corresponds to Abraham’s Sarah. One must wonder why God made it so difficult for them to have Isaac. When one takes contingency seriously, one understands that everything could have been otherwise. What would have happened if Isaac were not to be born? Sarah’s story exemplifies more than anything the indeterminacy of the future. 28. Ord. I, d. 32, q. 1, n. 23 [6:231]. 29. Ord. I, d. 3, p. 3, q. 2, n. 479 [3:286–87]. Trans. from Scotus, On Being and Cognition: Ordinatio 1.3, p. 220. 30. Scotus explainsthat “‘being accidental’ is not named so in the sense that ‘accidental’ deprives per se unity (perseitas) of the being in itself, but in comparison to a

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given cause. And in that way ‘accidental being’ refers to some existence with regard to a given cause, for which the event or existence is not essentially ordered. This occurs despite the intention of this cause which tends on its part to something else, so that this [existence or event] is joined [to this cause] in the minor part and accidentally.” QM. VI, q. 2, n. 17 [2:45] Also he writes: “[I]t seems there is an equally determinate cause related to the event of any effect that is natural.” Ibid., n. 32. [2:51–52]. 31. Rep. I-A, d. 1, p. 2, q. 1, n. 57 [1:130].

CHAPTER 9 1. Marcel Mauss, “A category of the human mind: the notion of person; the notion of self,” in The Category of the Person: Anthropology, Philosophy, History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 1. 2. John Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church (Crestwood, N.Y.: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1985), 31–33. 3. Tertullian, Against Praxeas11–12 (PL2, 1670D). Gilles Emery explains that Tertullian used the term persona in order to reject the view that the Father, Son and Holy spirit are simply modes of manifestations of God: “To speak of ‘person,’ from the beginning of the Trinitarian use of this word, is to signify the being that exists truly in itself, the reality that underlies the manifestation to others, the foundation of what appears in the action. To say, for instance, that the Son of God is a ‘person’ is to affirm that he has a proper existence or subsistence in himself, that he is not confused with the Father.” See Gilles Emery, “The Dignity of Being a Substance: Person, Subsistence, and Nature,” Nova et Vetera, English Edition 9, no. 4 (2011): 993. 4. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, 37. 5. Zizioulas, Being as Communion: Studies in Personhood and the Church, 41. The divine essence, Maria Burger explains, is the primordial general cause of being whereas the hypostasis denotes the specific existence. See Maria Burger, Personalität im Horizont absoluter Prädestination: Untersuchungen zur Christologiedes Johannes Duns Scotusundihrer Rezeption in Modernen Theologischen Ansätzen, vol. 40, Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologiedes Mittelalters, (Münster: Aschendorff, 1994), 21. 6. Cross, Duns Scotus, 65. 7. Augustine of Hippo, “St. Augustine: On the Holy Trinity, Doctrinal Treatises, Moral Treatises,” in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers. First series, ed. Philip Schaff (Peabody, Mass.: Hendrickson Publishers, 1994), 5.5 (89). Similarly, he writes that “in their mutual relation to one another in the Trinity itself, if the begetter is a beginning in relation to that which he begets, the Father is a beginning in relation to the Son, because He begets Him; but whether the Father is also a beginning in relation to the Holy Spirit.” Hippo, “St. Augustine: On the Holy Trinity, Doctrinal Treatises, Moral Treatises,” 5.14 (94). See also MaryT. Clark, “An Inquiry into Personhood,” 12.

Notes

173

8. Paul A. Bogaard, Gordon Treash, and Ivor Leclerc, “To Be is to Be Substancein-Relation,” in Metaphysics as foundation: essays in honor of Ivor Leclerc (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1993), 165. 9. William Riordan O’Connor, “The Concept of the Person in St. Augustine’s De Trinitate,” Augustinian Studies 13 (1982): 137. 10. Joseph Ratzinger, “Concerning the Notion of Person in Theology,”Communio 17, no. 3 (1990): 444. 11. See QDP 8.1. For further reading see Aquinas on Subsistent Relation. 12. ST 1.29.4, res. 13. Boethius, A Treatise Against Eutyches and Nestorius, Ch. 3. From: https:// biblehub.com/library/boethius/the_theological_tractates/a_treatise_against_ eutyches_and.htm. For further reading on Boethius’ discussion personhood and the christological problems it aroused with regard to Christ’s personality see Burger, Personalitätim Horizont absoluter Prädestination: Untersuchungen zur Christologiedes Johannes Duns Scotusund ihrer Rezeption in Modernen Theologischen Ansätzen, 40, 30–37. 14. Andrew Arlig, “The Metaphysics of Individuals in the Opuscula sacra,” in The Cambridge Companion to Boethius, ed. John Marenbon (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 146. 15. Mary T. Clark, “An inquiry into personhood,” The Review of Metaphysics (1992): 15. 16. For further reading see Burger, Personalitätim Horizont absoluter Prädestination: Untersuchungen zur Christologiedes Johannes Duns Scotusundihrer Rezeption in Modernen Theologischen Ansätzen, 40, 37–44. 17. Richard of Saint Victor, On the Trinity: English Translation and Commentary, trans. Ruben Angelici (Eugene, Or: Cascade Books, 2011), 147 (IV, 7). 18. Victor, On the Trinity: English Translation and Commentary, 163 (IV, 22). 19. Ord. I, d. 23, n. 15 [5:355–56]. 20. Ratzinger, “Concerning the notion of person in theology,” 449. 21. Victor, On the Trinity: English Translation and Commentary, 146 (IV, 6). 22. QDP 9.2. See also ST 1.29.1, res. 23. ST, 1.29.3. res. 24. QDP, 9.4, res. 25. QDP 9.3. ad5. 26. ST 1.29.4, res. 27. Lect. I, d. 23, n. 17 [17:307–08]. 28. Scotus maintained that though the divine essence is a singular, it is communicable. See Quodl.3.49 [17] as well as Ord. I, d. 2, p. 2, n. 367 [2:339–40]. See Cross, Duns Scotus on God, 162, 65. 29. Quodl. 19.63 [19]. 30. “[D]enying that there is a positive entity in a created intellectual nature that would be contradictorally opposed to its being communicated in a way repugnant to its remaining a person. For there seems to be no positive entity in a created nature that could not possibly depend upon another, and be communicable in the way a nature is said to be communicated to a supposit [or person]—a positive entity.” Ord. I, d.1, p. 1,

174

Notes

q. 2, n. 44 [2:30–31], trans. from Allan B. Wolter, “John Duns Scotus on the Primacy and Personality of Christ,” Franciscan Christology (1980): 177. 31. Scotus holds that the concept of being is univocal, i.e., that the same concept applies to both God and creatures. Consequently, the concept of being transcends the distinction between created and uncreated being, and is based on one and the same reality of infinite being, that is secondarily differentiated into an infinite perfect (God) and imperfect finite beings (creatures). As we have seen in chapter 2, when considering different kinds of beings, e.g., matter, man, angels and God, they all have the same principle of being, what Scotus calls subjective potency, that exist in different modes of existence. Personhood for Scotus does not add an ontological ingredient but rather manifests its perfection in its existence as a thinking and willing being. 32. This seems to support the common reading of Aquinas according to which the separated soul is deprived of personhood (to be elaborated in the following section). 33. N. Den Bok et al., “More than just an individual: Scotus’s Concept of Person from the Christological Context of Lectura III 1,” Franciscan Studies 66 (2008): 177. 34. Ord. I, d. 1, p.1, q. 2, n. 47 [2:32–33]. Trans. from Wolter, “John Duns Scotus on the Primacy and Personality of Christ,” 179. 35. Den Boket al., “More than just an individual: Scotus’s Concept of Person from the Christological Context of Lectura III 1,” 182. 36. Patrick Toner presents the quarrel between the standard view, which I follow, and the alternative view who claim that the soul retains its personality after it is separated from the body. See Patrick Toner, “Personhood and Death in St. Thomas Aquinas,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 26, no. 2 (2009). 37. QDP 9.2 ad. 14. For further reading, among others, see Robert Pasnau, Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature: A Philosophical Study of‘Summa Theologiae, 1a 75–89 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), Monograph, 385–86. http://search. ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=phl&AN=PHL2097851&site=ehost-live. 38. “Just as every man is a personal unity—that is, a unity of rational soul and flesh—so also is Christ a personal unity: Word and man.” Augustine, Confessions and Enchiridion, trans. Albert C. Outler (Philadelphia: Westminster, 1955), 362. A similar view is held by Bonaventure, who writes that “the soul is not a person, but the soul joined to the body is a person.” St. Bonaventure, De Assumptione B. Mariae Virginis, Senno I, 2, 9. See also Christina Van Dyke, “Medieval Mystics on Persons: What John Locke Didn’t Tell You,” in Persons: A History, ed. Antonia Lo Lordo (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 39. Giorgio Pini, “The Development of Aquinas’s Thought,” in The Oxford Handbook of Aquinas (Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 495–96. 40. Thomas Aquinas, Quaestion es Disputate de Anima, trans. John Patrick Rowan (St. Louis & London: B. Herder Book Co., 1949), a. 15, p. 200. 41. “Only a divine person has incommunicability . . . in an unqualified sense that excludes any possibility of being communicated. A created nature, however, though it may subsist in itself, has nothing intrinsic that would make it impossible for it to depend.” Translation in Wolter, “John Duns Scotus on the Primacy and Personality of Christ,” 175. 42. Ord. I, d. 2, p. 2, nn. 378–80 [2:344–345].

Notes

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43. Ord. I, d. 23, n. 16 [5:357]. For further reading see Cross, Duns Scotus on God, 159–61. 44. Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. James W. Ellington, 3rd ed. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1993), 30. 45. See discussion in p. 118. 46. Scott M. Williams, Disability in Medieval Christian Philosophy and Theology (New York, NY: Routledge, 2020). Richard Cross, “Duns Scotus on Disability: Teleology, Divine Willing, and Pure Nature,” Theological Studies 78, no. 1 (2017). Richard Cross, “Disability, Impairment, and Some Medieval Accounts of the Incarnation: Suggestions for a Theology of Personhood,” Modern Theology 27, no. 4 (2011). Richard Cross, “Aquinas on Physical Impairment: Human Nature and Original Sin,” Harvard Theological Review 110, no. 3 (2017). 47. Kevin Timpe, “Plurality in Medieval Concepts of Disability,” in Disability in Medieval Christian Philosophy and Theology, ed. Scott M. Williams (New York, NY: Routledge, 2020). p. 37. 48. Cross, “Disability, Impairment, and Some Medieval Accounts of the Incarnation: Suggestions for a Theology of Personhood,” footnote. 28.

EPILOGUE 1. Samuel Hugo Bergman, History of Philosophy: From Nicolaus Cusanus to the Age of Enlightment (Jerusalem: Bialik Institute, 1970), 11 (Hebrew).

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Index

Aertsen, Jan, 48 Albert the Great, 91 Alexander of Hales, 91 angels, 3, 37, 41–44, 57, 92, 125, 129 Anselm of Canterbury, 46, 47, 74 a posteriori, 30, 43, 51, 68–70, 75–76, 89, 130 a priori, 64, 68–71, 75–76, 82, 99, 100, 116 Aquinas, Thomas, ix, 8–11, 20, 44, 45–47, 49, 58, 61–66, 75, 76, 85, 90, 91–98, 104, 108, 113, 123, 125–27, 131 Arianism, 90 Aristotle, 7, 12, 21, 24, 38, 42, 52, 92, 98, 102, 107, 108, 109 Arlig, Andrew, 124 Augustine, 6–7 Averroes, 18, 38 Avicenna, 46–49 being: act of, 46, 49; absolute, 21, 23; becoming, 42, 61, 98, 107, 111, 114, 118–119; concept of, 12, 25; diminished, 18, 80; existence as predicate, 56; fictitious, 21, 49; haecceity, 8; hypostasis, 122–24, 130; immaterial, 3, 23, 41–44, 129; information entities, 3, 24,

33, 41, 44, 87; non-contradiction, 19, 22, 30, 40, 42–45, 48, 50, 53, 56, 58; nothing, 10, 12–13, 21, 22, 26, 38, 42, 50, 60, 65, 74, 82, 87, 118; of essence/existence, 20, 21, 50; opinable, 21; participation in being/truth, 50–51; potency (active), 32; potency (objective), 21; potency (passive), 32, 42; potency (subjective), 21, 24, 33, 71; quasiobjective, 113; quidditative, 21, 49; ratified/ens ratum, 21–22, 25, 43, 50–51, 53; relative, 23, 25; res coguitans/extensa, 24, 41; uncreated and infinite, 1, 9, 12, 25; univocity, 8; vestige, 50–51, 130 Bergman, Samuel Hugo, 135 Boethius, 124–25, 127 Bok, Nico den, 126 Bonaventure, 9, 10 Boulnios, Oliver, 8, 10 Casey, David, 37 causation: accidental, 117; agency, 108– 9, 112; co-causation, 68; efficient, 3, 71, 108–19; exemplar, 51; extrinsic, 98–99, 101, 102, 108; final, 71, 108, 109, 111–14, 118–22; formal, 110, 119; future possibilities, 62, 112; 193

194

Index

inferior, 67, 112, 117; information 14, 107; instrumental, 67, 108; intrinsic, 117; material, 23, 108, 116, 117; metaphorical, 113, 117–18, 121; motion, 28, 40, 68, 92, 108–9; origination, 23, 108, 109, 112; passive, 109; physical, 107; superior, 31, 67, 112; the will, 107, 116 condemnation of 1277, 7, 9 cosmos, 40, 44, 101, 104 Cote, Antonie, 20 creation: causal, 2; Christianity, 5–6; contingency, 9, 10, 45, 81, 107, 110, 116; creativity, 87; desire, 87; divine will, 3, 5, 6, 7, 11, 19, 54, 68; ex nihilo, 6, 7, 12, 37, 38; free will, 5; freedom, 13, 73; incarnation, 13, 73; Judaism, 6; limitation; logical, 2; love; matter; mythology, 5; order of intention and execution; place; possible world, 7, 9, 13, 45, 45, 51, 75, 80, 86, 131; predestination, 78, 86, 94; time, 61 Creel, Richard, 76 Cross, Richard, 18, 22–23, 38, 40–41, 65, 78–79, 99–100, 103, 131 Damascene, John, 90–91 Delio, Ilia, 8, 10 Descartes, Rene, 61, 127–8, distinction: formal, 22, 144; real, 22, 23, 62 divine knowledge, 62, 76, 85 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 73 Duhem, Pierre, 38 ethics, 4, 131; Euthyphro’s dilemma, 86; goodness, 74, 82, 102, 116; just laws, 80; legislation, 87; obligation, 13, 73, 84, 85; right reason, 14, 73, 75, 81–83, 84, 85 evil, 4, 5, 6, 12, 37, 49, 59, 82, 102 Facebook, 4, 13, 33, 60, 71, 74, 105 Feinberg, John, 77

Fourth Lateran Council, 6 Frank, William, 67 freedom, 7, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13, 15, 61, 64, 66, 70, 71, 73–77, 79, 81–83, 85–86, 87, 89, 96, 107, 110, 111, 120, 122; arbitrariness, 83; future contingents, 61, 63, 67, 70; human, 73, 75; knowledge-of-all-possibilities, 75–77; middle knowledge, 75, 76; presentism, 75, 76; risk, 75–76, 77; truth value, 70; voluntarism, 53 Geach, Pete, 76 Giles of Rome, 20 God: arbitrariness, 83; essence, 11, 26–28, 124–25; goodness, 10, 74, 79, 86; indifferent, 14, 86, 89; love, 10; objective, 67; of Abraham, 89; power, 4, 62, 66, 71, 74–76, 79–81, 86–87, 94, 116; risk taker, 75; subjective, 86; will, 6, 7, 11, 19, 54, 66, 68, 69, 76, 84, 94, 101, 104, 126, Gondreau, Paul, 90 good: essential, 102; harmony, 13, 85, 102, 122; highest good, 11, 76, 77; intrinsic-extrinsic perfection, 102; of the intellect, 102–103; of the will, 102–103 Google, 2, 4, 13, 60, 71, 74 Goris, Harm, 61–62 Grosseteste, Robert, 47 Heidegger, Martin, 9, 118 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 60, 118 Helm, Paul, 86 Henry of Ghent, 20, 45, 49, 63 hermeneutical, 136 Hilary of Poitiers, 90 history of philosophy, 118, 135–136 Hoffmann, Tobias, 53–54 incarnation: Christ, 76, 94, 101, 104; human, 95, 97, 98; impassibility,

Index

195

99; two natures, 91, 98, 1013, 104; transcendental model, 8 information: and creativity, 87; as reality, 107; epistemological, 31; incommunicability, 31; interpretation, 44; language, 45, 60, 136; meaning, 24; ontological, 3, 24, 70 information agency, 33 information technology: artificial intelligence, 2, 3, 14, 46, 89, 105; communication and operation, 2–3, 33, 60, 133; entities, 2, 3, 4, 9, 13, 24, 33, 41, 44, 87, 129, 131; ethics, 4, 13; computation, 3, 4, 22, 24, 29, 30, 33, 58–59, 105, 107; shaping of the self, 71; superintelligence, 4 Ingham, Mary Beth, 8, 10, 81 intellection and thinking acts: agent intellect, 67; incommunicability, 32–33, 125–27, 129; intelligible species, 58; intuitive cognition, 32, 57–58; object of thought, 30 Internet of Things, 4 Israeli, Isaac, 46

potency, 21, 24, 33, 71; changeable, 20, 70, 123; hylomorphic (composite), 24; idea of matter, 17, 19–20, 22; incommunicability, 32–33, 125–127, 129; individuation, 4, 18, 124, 125; material form, 22, 23, 25–26, 28–30, 32, 107, 116; metaphysical, 1–3, 9, 14, 17, 18, 33, 45, 46, 63, 104, 118–119, 125; non-being, 20; quantity of (quantitas materiae), 41, 129; un/created, 1, 9, 12, 25; un/intelligible (un/ knowable), 19, 76 Mauss, Marcel, 121 McTaggart, John, 61 medieval philosophy, 7, 137–38 memory: conserver, 30, 116, 127; elicit, 29, 30, 51, 52, 66, 76, 98, 100, 117, 127; im/perfect, 32; logicaltranscendental, 30, 116 Minder, Robert, 90 modern philosophy, 3 Molina, Luis de, 75–76 Moltmann, Jürgen, 95

Jerome, 91, 93

necessitation, 11, 66, 73, 77

Kant, Immanuel, 13, 55–57, 61, 73, 99, 100, 128 knowledge: abstract, 31, 57, 58, 122; contingent consideration, 44; existential, 30, 75; infused, 127 Kretzmann, Norman, 64, 65, 86

Ockham, William, 110 O’Connor, William Riordan, 123

Lagerlund, Herik, 110 Lang, Helen S., 38 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 9, 10, 70, 82–83, 85–87, 138 Lombard, Peter, 47, 63 Marrone, Steven P., 47 matter: Aristotelian, 7, 9, 24, 25, 39, 48, 92, 108, 123, 130; as memory, 116; as objective potency, 21; as passive potency, 32, 42; as subjective

Pancheri, Francis Xavier, 95 Parmenides, 38, 118 passions: propassions, 91, 93; psychophysiological account, 93; will, 96 perfect being theology, 74; immutability, 78, 98, 101, 110; pure perfections (omni-potence/science/benevolence), 74; qualified; theodicy, 83, 86. See also information technology personhood, 12, 14, 121; created/hood, 122, 126; disability, 130–131; divine, 126; etymology, 122; freedom; in/ dependency, 120, 123, 125, 126; incommunicability, 125; inner subjective personal structure, 124;

196

Index

obedience, 124; self, 124; soul (separated), 126; transcendental, 128; will, 126, 128, 130. See also incarnation Philip the Chancellor, 47 place and body: absolute, 39, 43; Aristotelian physics, 39; containing and contained body, 38–39, 44; locare/locari, 38; direction, 38; extension, 38–39, 40–41; immaterial, 23, 41–42, 44; in/variant, 47; motion or rest, 40; placement, 42–43, 44, 54; possible geometries, 55; space, 38; ubi, 38, 41, 44 Plato, 6 possible worlds, 7, 9, 13, 45, 51, 75, 80, 82, 86, 104, 131, 138; possible futures, 70, 71, 76, 111, 112, 114, 115, 119 power: absolute act, 80–81; arbitrariness, 83; degree of, 81; limitation, 37, 45, 58, 59, 77, 126, 131, 132; logic of power, 77; potential dei absoluta/ordinate, 79, 80, 116; rightful act, 80. See also God Primacy of Christ, 8, 10, 75, 76, 78 relation: symmetric-asymmetric, 65, 69; causal, 2; creation, 10; internalexternal, 6, 21–22, 26, 32–33, 39–40, 42–44, 50, 52–53, 57, 69, 84, 90–91, 97, 99–103, 129; intransitive, 68; logical, 2; mutable-immutable, 99, 104; transitive, 47, 65, 68 Richard of Middleton, 23 Richard of St. Victor, 124

Silesius, Angelus, 60 sin: Christianity, 5; Gnosticism and Manicheism, 5, 6; the Fall, 1, 77, 78, 93–95 Spang-Hanssen, Henning, 24 Stump, Eleonore, 64–65 Suarez, Francisco, 108 Suárez-Nani, Tiziana, 39

Sabellianism, 123 Sanders, John, 75 Scotus, John Duns, 3, 7–12, 15–31, 36–44, 45–47, 50–55, 57–58, 63–69, 73, 75, 76–84, 87, 93–102, 107–18, 121, 124–31, 137–38 sensation: common sense, 26, 28; proper sensibles, 28

Velde, Rudi te, 9 Voltaire, 74 Vos, Antonie, 18

technology: machine, 45, 59–60; agricultural revolution, 58; computational revolution, 58; revolution (industrial), 59; technological revolution, 58; See also God. See also information. See also information technology. Tertullian, 122 The Enlightenment, 60 time: diachronic identity, 31, 127; dynamic, 61; ET-simultaneity, 64–65; eternity, 13, 44, 61–65, 68, 69, 75–76, 89, 92, 94, 120; simultaneity, 64–65; temporality, 13, 61, 68, 89; tensed (B type), 61 transcendentals, 1, 7–8, 12, 98, 101–103; creaturehood, 1, 11, 59, 131, 132; notions, 7, 8, 9; vestige, 50–51, 130 truth: analogical, 48–49; conformity/ adequation, 46–47; invariant, 45; perfection of rationality, 57; physicalist, 3, 17, 107; proposition, 48; reality (real/virtual/alternative), 1, 4, 7, 21, 105, 107; rectitude, 46–47, 51, 91. See also a priori. See also God.

will: affection for advantage/justice (affection commode/iustitiae), 84; autonomy, 71, 112; determination of possibilities, 112; intentionality,

Index

96–97; univocal, 7, 12, 25, 80, 86. See also a posteriori. See also a priori. See also God. William of Alnwick, 67 William of St. Thierry, 124 Williams, Thomas, 84

197

Wippel, John F., 47 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 137 Weinandy, Thomas G., 90 Wolter, Allen B., ix, 15, 57, 64, 81, 84 Zizioulas, John, 122–123

About the Author

Liran Shia Gordon completed his doctorate at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and was a fellow at KU Leuven and the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome and is a fellow at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute. In his research, Gordon examines various issues in metaphysics, ontology, epistemology, mind and cognition, language, and theology, and engages with a large array of philosophers and theologians throughout history. Gordon is currently the head of research at the media company Stelo Stories.

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