William of Ockham. The Metamorphosis of Scholastic Discourse [First ed.] 0874716799, 0719005779

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WILLIAM

OF OCKHAM

ALSO

BY GORDON

LEFF

Gregoryof Ri111i11i RichardFitzralph Heresyin the latermiddleages

TO THE MEMORY

TerenceJones FORMERLY

SECRETARY

TO THE MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY

PRESS

OF

GORDON

LEFF

William of Ockham The metamorphosisof scholasticdiscourse

MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS ROWMAN AND LITTLEFIELD

._J_)

/(OJ

©

1975 GORDON LEFF

All rightsreserved Published by MANCHESTER UNIVERSITY PRESS Oxford Road, Manchester Ml3 9PL ISBN

O

7190 0577 9 (uK)

USA ROWMAN AND LITTLEFIELD 81 Adams Drive, Totowa, N.J. 07512 LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING IN PUBLICATION DATA Leff, Gordon. William of Ockham. Bibliography: p. 645. Includes index. 1. Ockham, William, d. ea. 1349. B765.034L43 1975 ISBN 0-87471-679-9 (usA) ISBN 0-7190-0577-9 (uK)

189

The author and publishers are grateful to the trustees of THE BRITISH ACADEMY for a subvention towards the production of this volume

Printed in Great Britain by W & J Mackay Limited, Chatham

74-34588

CONTENTS

Preface Abbreviations Introduction

page ix XI Xlll

PART ONE

THE COGNITIVE ORDER

CHAPTER ONE

Simple cog11ition

2

Intuitive and abstractive knowledge

6

I

Intuitive knowledge of non-existents

14

III

The relation of intuitive and abstractive knowledge

30

IV

Sensory experience

44

Memory and the Word

55

Simple angelic cognition

60

The primacy of individual cognition

62

II

v VI

vn CHAPTER TWO

Conceptsa11d11niversals Concepts The status of universals

104

Terms a11dtheir modesof significatio11

124

Terms and signs

125

Supposition and signification

131

III

Absolute and connotative terms

139

IV

Predication: univocity, equivocation and analogy

149

II

CHAPTER THREE

n

v 1 2

3

Transcendentals, predicables and categories Transcendentals: the concept of being Predicables Categories (a) Substance (b) Quality (c) Quantity (d) Relation

164 164 177

196 199 203

207 213

V

Z.51712

Vl

CONTENTS

Propositions,syllogismsand demonstrations

238

2 3

Propositions Truth and falsity The formation of propositions: apprehension and assent The kinds of propositions

239 240 245 255

II

Syllogisms

267

Demonstration

273

CHAPTER FOUR

I

III

PART TWO

THE THEOLOGICAL ORDER

Theologyand knowledgeof God

320

Scientia

320

Theology and knowledge

335

III

The subject of theology

346

IV

Theology: speculative or practical?

349

Knowledge of God

359

Proof of God's existence

382

God's nature

399

Essence and attributes

400

The divine persons

4II

III

Knowledge and divine ideas

436

IV

Future knowledge

447

CHAPTER SEVEN

God and creatures

455

Omnipotence

455

Predestination

468

III

Grace and acceptance

470

IV

Free will: virtue, vice, merit and sin

476

CHAPTER FIVE

II

V VI CHAPTER SIX I II

II

PART THREE CHAPTER EIGHT

II III

THE CREATED ORDER

Man

528

The intellective soul and its powers

529

The sensitive soul

547

Habits

553

CONTENTS

VII

Nature

561

Natural philosophy as scientia

566

Matter and form

567

III

Causality

580

IV

3

Movement, time, and place Movement Time Place

584 584 593 596

V

The Eucharist

596

Society

614

Bibliography

645

Index Names and writings Subjects

650 651 654

CHAPTER NINE

II

l 2

CHAPTER TEN

II

PREFACE

At a time when the study of Ockham' s thought in its different facets is becoming more int'ensive, an attempt to present his outlook as a whole may not be inappropriate. Over a thinker as distinctive as Ockham there are bound to be varying, if not conflicting, judgements. But I hope I have at least presented the issues which engaged his thought and the manner in which he responded to them. I wish to express my appreciation for the help I have received from many sources: in particular, to the British Academy for a grant towards the costs of publication; to the Vatican Library, Bodleian Library, Bibliotheques Mazarine and Nationale, Paris, Bibliotheque Royale, Brussels, and the British School at Rome; to Miss Beryl Smalley, Professor T. F. Torrance and Fr. J. A. Weisheipl for reading the typescript; and to the Manchester University Press for maintaining unimpaired their tradition of co-operativeness of which I have so frequently been the beneficiary. October 1974

G.L.

ABBREVIATIONS GENERAL

TITLES

Archives-Archives d' histoiredoctrinaleet litterairedu 11ioyen-dge AFH-Aichivum Franciscanum Historicum FcS-Franciscan Studies FS-Fra11ziskanischeStudien Recl1erches-Recl1erches de theologieancienneet medievale RHE-Revue d'l1istoireecclesiastique

OCKHAM'S

WORKS

A11Princeps-AII Princepspro succursu,scilicetpossit reciperebo11aecclesiarum,etiam invito papa guerrae(OP, I, 223-271) Breviloquium-Breviloquium de principatutyrannicosuper divina et humana, ed. R. Scholz, in Wilhelm von Ockham als politischerDenker und sein Breviloquiumde principatu tyrannico (Leipzig, 1944; reprinted Stuttgart, 1952) 39-220 ContraBe11edictu111-Tractatus contraBe11edictum (OP, III, 157-322) Contra Ioannem-Tractatus contraIoa11ne111 (OP, III, 19-156) De Imp-Tractatus de Imperatorumet Pontificu111 Potestate,ed. C. K. Brampton (Oxford, 1927) De Sacramento-De SacramentoAltaris, MSS.: Vatican Library, Borghese Lat. 151; Ottoboni Lat. 179. Printed Strasbourg, 1491 De Successivis-The 'Tractatus de successivis'attributedto William Ockham, ed. P. Boehner (New York, 1944) De Praedestinatione-The 'Tractatus de praedestinatione et De praescientiaDei et defuturis contingentibusof William Ockham,ed. P. Boehner (New York, 1945) Dialogus-Dialogus de Imperio et PontificaPotestate(Lyon, 1494; reprinted as vol. r of Opera Plurima, 1962) EA-Expositio Aurea et admodumutilis super artemveteremeditaper venerabilemG. de Ockham cum quaestionibusAlberti Parvi de Saxonia (Bologna 1496; reprinted, 1965). Contains Ockham's Commentaries on Porphyry's Isagogueand Aristotle's Categoriesand Perihermenias Elementariwn-Guillelmi Ockham,ElementariumLogicae,ed. E. M. Buytaert in FcS 25 (1965), 170-276; 26 (1966), 66-173 Ele11ch.-Tractatussuper librosElenchorum,MS. Paris, Bib. Nat. 14721 Expositio-Expositionis in libros artis logicaeprooemium et Expositio in libru111 Propltyrii De Praedicabilibus, ed. E. A. Moody (New York, 1965) LogicaeMinor-Logicae Minor Tractatus,ed. E. M. Buytaert, in FcS 24 (1964), 55-100 Octo Quaestiones-Octo Quaestionesde PotestatePapae,OP, I (1-222) OND-Opus Nonaginta Dierum, chs. 1-6 (OP, I, 289-374); chs. 7-124 (OP, II, 375-858) OP, 1-m-Guillelmi de Ockham OperaPolitica,vol. r, ed. J. G. Sikes et al. (Manchester, 1940); vol. 11,ed. H. S. Offier (Manchester, 1963); vol. III, ed. H. S. Offier (Manchester, 1956) Ordinatio-Commentary on the Sentences,book r: (a) Prologue and distinctions 1-3 in OTr and 11; (b) Distinctions 4-48 in Super IV Libros Sententiarum(Lyon, 1495; reprinted by XI

Xll

ABBREVIATIONS

Gregg in Opera Plurima,III, 1962); (c) MSS.: Florence, Bib. Naz, conv. soppr. A.3-801; Paris, Bib. Mazarine, 894; 962 OT, 1-n-Guillelmi de Ockham, Scriptumill Librum Primw11SententiarumOrdinatio,ed. G. Gal and S. Brown, vol. 1: Prologus et Distinctio Prima (New York, 1967); vol. II: Distinctiones II-III (New York, 1970) Questiones-Questionesin librosPhysicorumMSS.: Paris, Bib. Nat. Lat. 17841; Vat. Lat. 956 Q11odlibet-Q11odlibeta Septem (Strasbourg, 1491; reprinted Louvain, 1962) MSS. Paris, Bib. Nat. 17841; Vatican Vat. Lat. 956, 3075. I have followed the Strasbourg order of questions Reportatio-Super IV Libros Sente11tiarum,books II-IV (Lyons, 1495); reprinted in Opera Pl11rima, IV, edited by Gregg, 1962); MSS.: Florence, Bib. Naz. Conv. Soppr. A. 3. 801; Paris, Bib. Mazarine 893 PhilosophicalWritings-Ockha111,PhilosophicalWritings: A Selection, ed. and trans. by P. Boehner (New York, 1957) SL-Summa Logicae,pts. I, II, III (i), ed. P. Boehner: I (New York, 1957), II-III (i) (1962); Summa Totius Logicae,pt. III (ii)-(iii) (Oxford, 1675); MSS. Paris, Bib. Nat. Lat. 6431; Paris, Bib. Mazarine, 3521 SP-Summulae Physicorum(PhilosophiaNaturalis Guilielmi Ockham (Rome, 1637))

INTRODUCTION

OcKHAM WASAN INNOVATOR; and until recently he has had to suffer for being judged by his supposed influence upon others rather than for his own achievement. The judgement was almost uniformly derogatory because no distinction was made between his outlook and Ockhamism; the latter's earlier extravagances and later barrenness were transposed to this thought. He was made the destroyer of scholasticism, responsible for upsetting its fine balance between faith and reason, by a combination of ruthless logic and religious insensitivity, if indeed not scepticism. In the last thirty or so years the studies begun by Hochstetter, Vignaux, Moody, Baudry, Boehner, 1 and his pupils, have gradually disposed of the old cartoon and helped to restore the original Ockham as an authentic Christian thinker in the scholastic tradition. However he may have transformed that tradition and, whatever his place in it, the inappropriateness of the older labels of 'nominalist' and 'fideist' and the groundlessness of calling him a sceptic are now sufficiently plain. I have not sought to replace these by other labels. In earlier books I have been guilty of just this misrepresentation through viewing Ockham from the same false perspective of Ockhamism. In the present book-which is in the nature of a retractation-I have sought to see his thought whole, in its own terms, not in pedigrees or, save in passing, by its subsequent effects. It is not principally an historical study. In part that is due to inadequate knowledge; but it is due in greater part to the belief that an outlook must first be known before it can be related to anything. That would scarcely be worth saying but for the widespread assumption prevalent among those engaged in the history of ideas that identification and assessment of an outlook begin with a thinker's antecedents, both intellectual and circumstantial. On that view, the way to any unknown system of thought is through the thought and circumstances that are deemed to have influenced it. That in effect means the search for sources in the thought of others and the life of the thinker concerned. As with most half-truths, there is enough in this one to make it plausible. No one is likely to contest that there is some kind of interplay between different outlooks or that without some framework in which to measure a system it will remain largely unintelligible. The fallacy, however, is to confuse the dependence-if there is one-of a thinker upon his antecedents with our dependence upon the same antecedents for subsequent know ledge of his outlook. The first is a real order of succession; the second is an order of intelligibility. Not only does the first not entail the second, but the order of the second must be inverted because any empirical 1

See bibliography. Xlll

XIV

INTRODUCTION

investigation begins from what has to be explained. If we already knew the antecedent we could explain the consequence from it deductively. There would then be no need for investigation. In any relation, however, logically we must know the terms before we can know they are related: just as we can know that someone is a man without knowing that he is a father or a son, so we can know-in the sense of at least formulating its concepts-Ockham's outlook independently of knowing its circumstances or sources. Conceptually, on the other hand, we only gain more perfect, i.e. complete and perhaps intelligible, knowledge when we know the other terms in a relation-where they exist. It is the failure to observe that distinction which confuses more complete knowledge, that comes from knowing the antecedent conditions with knowing the object at all; the former may well be the condition of a proper assessment and so-conceptually-inseparable from adequate knowledge of an outlook; but it remains distinct from and logically dependent upon prior knowledge of what is to be assessed. That again would perhaps not be worth saying were it not for the impoverishing effects of an order which puts the antecedents first. It is equivalent to reducing a sufficient cause to its necessary conditions, a view which is both contradictory and naive. It is contradictory because it assumes that what is to be identified can be explained by what precedes it. But that would preclude the capacity to account for the untypical and the new-the very problem presented by an outlook like Ockham' s. There is all the difference between defining one thing in terms of others, including negatively, and explaining something in terms of other things. The first is involved in any act of identification and does not entail dependence or likeness; we can as well say 'A man is not an ass' as 'A man is a rational being'. The second, however, makes just that assumption of assimilability to what already exists or is known. To accept it as the mode of procedure would be to deny irreducible difference, since knowledge of anything would be contained in its antecedents. That would exclude independent agency. For given the conditions, the consequences would be bound to follow. In fact it is just the difference of response within a common framework-of assumptions, conventions, texts, authorities, and problems-that differentiates one thinker from another and does not permit their identification with it or their reduction to it. In practice, of course, few-if any-would assert that it did. There is no dispute over the real difference between Aquinas or Scotus or Ockham. Nevertheless the effect of the neopositivist search for antecedents is to substitute an emphasis upon inBuences for the nature of the thought itself: to assessit for its rapport with others rather than for its own meaning; to stress circumstances rather than agents; to displace inner coherence by external dependence. It is there that the impoverishing effects lie, in making it almost a methodological postulate-which runs directly counter to the standing presumption in any such enquiry of individual difference-

INTRODUCTION

xv

that the new can be assimilated to the old, and the untypical explained by the typical. Of itself, of course, it is no less legitimate to study similarities rather than differences; the mistake is to subsume difference under similarities instead of recognising their reciprocity, which comes from their distinctiveness. For that reason too, reliance upon sources to identify an outlook is also naive; for it assumes that a source is always the same source. That, to say the least, is a dubious assumption, and nowhere more than among medieval thinkers, concerned constantly to be reconciled with their authorities. There is not one Aristotle or Augustine in the middle ages but many. Whose then do we choose? Those of Grosseteste? Alexander of Hales? Albert the Great? Thomas Aquinas? Henry of Ghent? Duns Scotus? Ockham? That is a question of direct concern to the study of Ockham. As we shall see throughout this book, he justifies his ontology, epistemology, psychology, logic, and natural philosophy, all by appeal to Aristotle. Yet his is not the Aristotle of Aristotle's own writings (if he can be identified), nor the Aristotle of Aquinas or Averroes or Siger of Brabant, each in turn different. Left to themselves none of those will provide the reason; if it is to be found, that will be within the context of Ockham's own outlook. What has been said is not intended to depreciate the study of circumstances. It is to stress that the questions they answer are by definition circumstantial-of person, place, time, influence, text; not of the nature of the thought itsel£ The misconception is to think that they do or that they are the prerequisites for doing so. It is then that distortion arises, either in magnifying or in misinterpreting the role of an idea, as Ockham' s theory of concepts has been magnified and his theory of God's absolute power misrepresented, through being judged by extrinsic criteria; or by introducing irrelevant considerations, such as the provenance of a particular notion or doctrine which, whatever its interest taken for itself or in other contexts, is incidental to Ockham's own thought: in terms of its role in his outlook what would it matter whether Ockham had learned canon law at his mother's knee rather than, say, at Oxford? And does our present ignorance of where it was add to or detract from its role in his political theories? Only if we are concerned with the diffusion of canon law or Ockham's own biography does the question then arise. But those are different questions designed to meet different problems. Accordingly there is not only one kind of significance and one kind of question which serves it. In this book they are measured by reference to Ockham's own thought and only incidentially to the origin or subsequent import of his ideas. I have done so not in vindication of a particular thesis or approach but in answer to the questions, What did Ockham think, and what was the nature of his thought? For that I have sought to observe Ockham's own emphases. Hence the disparity in length between the different parts of this study. In that context little need be said of the little that is known about his life and

XVI

INTRODUCTION

circumstances. 2 He was born probably between 1280 and 1285 at Ockham. in Surrey; he entered the Franciscan order and was probably ordained subdeacon in 1306; he studied at Oxford where he commented the Sentencesprobably between 1317 and 1319 and certainly before 1323, in which year fifty-six extracts from them were taken by the recent chancellor of the University, John Lutterell, and presented to the pope at Avignon for censure. The pope set up a commission and Ockham was summoned to Avignon. He remained there for four years until 1327. During that time two versions of the commission's articles of censure, totalling fifty-one, were drawn up.3 They included his doctrine of the eucharist where, as we shall see in chapter nine, he denied the independent existence of quantity as something distinct from substances and qualities, and upheld the annihilation of the bread rather than its inner transformation; God's power to suspend the normal operation of secondary causes and to act directly himself in such matters as rewarding acts not performed in grace, producing immediate knowledge of what was not present, enabling bodies to be simultaneously in different places; and a series of propositions radically simplifying relations both within God and among creatures, as well as limiting the area of evidential knowledge. In the context of Ockham' s outlook these different propositions appear neither paradoxical nor incongruous with faith. Taken out of his context and put in the context of a rather rigid Thomism, which Lutterell seemed to have upheld, they appear to be both, as they did to the Avignon Commissioners who variously described the views contained in the censured articles as 'heretical', 'false', 'dangerous', 'erroneous', 'rash' and 'contradictory'. These responses indicate the distance between Ockham's thinking and previous conceptions. But it was not for these that he was to be excommunicated. That came from his defection to the pope's enemy, the German emperor, together with 2 For Ockham's life see especially L. Baudry, G11illau111e d'Occam: sa vie, ses oeuvres,ses idees (Paris, 1950); Tractatusde Successivis,edited by P. Boehner (New York, 1944), 1-15; C. K. Brampton, 'Chronological gleanings from Martival episcopal register', AFH 58 (1965), 369-93; H. Junghans, Ockham im Lichte der 11eurmForschung(Berlin and Hamburg, 1968), 25-41; and J. Miethke, OckhatnsWeg zur Sozialphilosophie(Berlin, 1969), 1-136. The books of Junghans and Miethke are-from different standpoints-general assessments of Ockham. That of Junghans is a survey of what he calls the new picture of Ockham by reference principally to P. Boehner's writings; it is a comprehensive, if at times apologetic, survey of the main writings upon Ockham in the light of present knowledge, to which it is a valuable introduction. Miethke's book is no less valuable as a thoroughgoing re-examination of Ockham's life and works and certain aspects of his thought; but it is less comprehensive, and unfortunately does not reveal the intellectual-as opposed to the biographical-path to Ockham's social philosophy. 3 Lutterell's list of fifty-six articles as well as his own refutation of them in his Libellus co11tra doctrinamGuillelmi Occamhas been edited by F. Hoffmann, Die Schriften des Oxforder Kanzlers JoliannesLutterell (Leipzig, 1959), 3-102; his list and his replies are also to be found in J. Koch, 'Neue Aktenstiicke zu dem gegen Wilhelm Ockham in A vignon gefiihrten Prozess', Recherclzes 7 (_19~5), 37~-80. ~he fifty-011;earticles of the Commissi?n of A vignon were in two lists, differing pnnc1pally m theu order, with the second also fuller m certain places. They have been edited by Koch, 'Neue Aktenstiicke', Recherches8 (1936), 83-93, 168-97. Previously the second list only was edited by A. Pelzer, 'Les 51 Articles de Guillaume d'Occam censures en Avignon en 1326', RHE 18 (1922), 240-70, who first discovered them. '

INTRODUCTION

XVll

the general of his order, Michael of Cesena, who had also been at Avignon, summoned to answer for his opposition to pope John XXII's condemnation of the Franciscan doctrine of absolute evangelical poverty: a matter which we shall touch upon in the final chapter. In 1328 Ockham and Michael of Cesena with other of their confreres fled from Avignon to Ludwig of Bavaria at Pisa, then engaged in a war of words against the pope over the latter's refusal to recognise his imperial title. Henceforth Ockham became one of a band of distinguished emigres at the imperial ·court, spending the rest of his life as a political polemicist against papal pretensions, first in defence of Franciscan poverty and then of independent temporal authority, until his death at Munich in 1349. The flight from Avignon divided Ockham's career in two. Until 1328 he remained an academic scholastic, probably writing his Sum111a Logicaeand perhaps his De SacramentoAltaris in Avignon. After 1328 he became a polemicist, or publicist, engaged in a continual struggle to vindicate his order, or rather its erstwhile leaders and principles, and his protector the emperor, and to inculpate popes John XXII and then Benedict XII for heresy and abuse of spiritual power. This book is devoted principally to the first phase, of Ockham as theologian, philosopher and logician. But the last chapter will attempt briefly to discern its connection with the political doctrines of the second phase. Unlike the writings of his political period, the sequence of Ockham's speculative works is far from settled. Without attempting here to give reasons, which will appear at different times in subsequent chapters, especially chapter two, I am inclined to place Ockham' s Commentary on the Sentences as the earliest of his works. As it has survived, it is in two different forms. The first book is an ordinatio, that is, a completed and edited version, and in this case revised to distinction twenty-seven, by Ockham himself. It is much fuller and more considered than the reports (reportationes)that constitute the other three books. These were not edited by Ockham; they remain unrevised and may not even have been corrected by him. They also contain questions which probably did not belong to the original (book two, questions 8, part of 20, 25 from U, in the 1495 edition; book three, questions 5, 12 (which is also found again in Quodlibet four as question 6, where it also does not belong), questions 13-15; and the 'Additiones' at the end of book four in the printed edition). 4 These were probably from separate disputations, although their authenticity is not in doubt, nor their pertinence to the other topics. The first book has now been edited to the end of distinction three in the first two volumes of the new collected edition of Ockham' s theological and philosophical works by the Franciscan Institute at St Bonaventure, New York. The remainder of the Commentary is in the edition ofTreschel printed at Lyon in 1495 which I have used in conjunction with the manuscripts given in the list of abbreviations. In view 4

P. Boehner, CollectedArticleson Ockham(New York and Louvain, 1958) 24.

XVlll

INTRODUCTION

of the different forms of the first and the other three books of the Commentary, I have followed Boehner in calling the first book the Ordinatio and the remaining three books the Reportatio. In order to avoid confusion I have adopted what might appear to be the inconsistency of referring to the three books of the Reportatio as two, three and four, and reserved book one for the Ordinatio. They are sufficiently different to be treated separately; and as I shall discuss in chapter two, the Ordinatio, in having been itself revised, represents a distinct work and a more considered expression of Ockham's thinking than the three unedited and unrevised books of the Reportatio. Together, however, they provide the foundation of his thought in containing all its principal elements, especially his epistemology, theology and moral philosophy. To that extent his Commentary on the Sentences taken as a whole can be regarded as his most representative work as a conspectus of his outlook. It does not, however, have the preponderating place in his outlook that, say, Opus Oxoniense-has in his. That is in part due Duns Scotus's Commentary-the to the incomplete state of the last three books as reportationes; but it is also because the one real synthesis and the most constructive of all his writings comes towards the end of the first phase of his career in the Summa Logicae, written between 1323 and 1329, probably by 1327. A Commentary on the Sentences was, in origin at least, always a work of apprenticeship as the first important independent exercise undertaken by a bachelor of theology towards his doctorate (which, for reasons unknown, Ockham did not obtain: hence his title, 'Venerable Inceptor' as one who had incepted or qualified to become a doctor, save in the final requirement of presiding at a special ceremonial disputation and delivering a formal doctoral lecture). 5 Ockham's Commentary was no exception. His Logic, by contrast, was composed probably between five and ten years later. It is correspondingly more mature, and, to my mind, Ockham's master work. As we shall see, above all in chapters three and four, Ockham's conception oflogic was central to his outlook, not through reducing all problems to questions oflogic or in the formal sense of approaching them logically -all scholastics did that-but as the means of ordering all knowledge and of ascertaining the different degrees of certainty which men can have. Between these two termini, the Commentary on the Sentences and the Logic, come the Commentaries on Aristotle's so-called old Logic, of the Categories, Perihermenias and Sophistical Questions, together with a Commentary on Porphyry's Introduction to the Categories (the Isagogue) which was its then almost inseparable accompaniment. Their chronological relation to the Commentary on the Sentences will be considered in chapter two, over Ockham's theory of concepts. Here it need only be said that unlike the Commentary on the Sentences the four Logical Com5 This is the interpretation of Boehner, which I accept, together with its combination by Miethke (op. cit., 32-4) with Brampton's suggestion, 'Guillaume d'Ockham, fut-il mahre en theologie?'_, Etudes Franciscaines13 (1963), 53-9, that Ockham had already left Oxford for another Franciscan house where he lectured on Aristotle's logic.

INTRODUCTION

XlX

mentaries (of which the first two and the last have become traditionally and groundlessly known as the S11mma Attrea, from the title given to them by their first editor, Mark of Benevento, at the end of the fifteenth century) would almost certainly have been from lectures by Ockham after he had left Oxford to teach in a Franciscan house of studies-perhaps at Reading. 6 The same can be said of his Commentary on the Physics,like the Commentary on the SophisticalQuestionsstill unprinted, which probably dates from the same period. Between these Aristotelian Commentaries arid the Logic come the free, quodlibetal, Questions (Quodlibets)and the Questions on the Physics. When and where and how they originated we do not could have been from free disputations either within the know. The Q11odlibets theological faculty at Oxford or in one of the Franciscan houses; Ockham could have either disputed under some master or perhaps himself presided at the disputations. The Questions on the Physics, on the other hand, probably derived from Ockham's teaching activity within his order, since they would not have formed part of the theological course. What can be said is that they come after the Quodlibets,to which they refer in a number of different places. 7 Finally there are the two remaining independent works of his philosophical period. The first is the uncompleted SummulaePhysicorumdesigned to comprehend nature in all its aspects according to Aristotelian principles; it forms the basis of part of chapter nine below. It again is a work of comparative maturity, and one can only surmise that it came either at the end of Ockham's time in England or at Avignon: I incline to the second alternative mainly on grounds of credibility: it is more than enough to believe that Ockham composed a Commentary on the Se11tences in four books, four Logical Commentaries, the Commentary and Questions on the Physics, within at most seven years from 1317 to 1324. Similar considerations apply to his two opuscles on the eucharist; I have used only the second and longer treatise, which generally goes under the single name of De Sacramento Altaris.s As should be apparent in chapter nine, it was designed to vindicate Ockham' s views on transubstantiation which Lutterell had included for censure. Whether or not one or both treatises were written at Oxford or A vignon, they must, it seems to me, have been written after 1323, in response to Lutterell's action. These are the works upon which, except for the last chapter where Ockham's polemical works will be considered separately, I have drawn in this book; to them should be added the shorter treatises on Predestination and Successives and two later and lesser logical treatises, the Elementsof Logic and the Mi11orTreatiseof Logic, 6 I agree here with Brampton, 'The probable order of Ockham's non-polemical works', Traditio 19 (1963), 480-1. For his suggestion of the Franciscan House at Reading see 'Chronological gleanings from Martival register', 380-93. 7 For their relation, see Miethke, Ockhams Weg, 43-7. s Boehner, CollectedArticles, 10-II; L. Baudry, 'Sur trois manuscrits occomistes', Archives 10-II (1935-6), 129-62.

INTRODUCTION

XX

which date from his Munich period in the 1340s. The various editions and manuscripts will be found in the list of Abbreviations. I have excluded what appear to me to be the unauthentic or doubtful Centiloquium, against accepting which as Ockham' s work the arguments of Baudry and Boehner seem overwhelming, 9 and also the Tractatus de Principiis Theologiae. But I have cited the Tractatus de Successivis since it is a compilation from Ockham's Commentary on the Physics. Despite their diversity and the still uncertain state of most of the texts, these works have a remarkable unity. They are shaped by the same principles which recur throughout Ockham' s writings: for all the repetitions, and the contrast between the prolixities of the earlier commentaries and the comparative economy of the Quodlibets, the two shorter works on physics and the Logic, taken together they are like variations upon a set of common themes. Whatever the modifications still to come as his works are properly edited, it is inconceivable that they will alter the configuration of Ockham's thought. ~ Mi~-(~\,.,--t/ ~ r,~,f ,_. !/ It is founded upon the discrepancy between the conceptual and the ontological, expressed in the contrast between the individual nature of all being and the universal nature of our concepts and terms constituting proper knowledge of it. Instead of assuming or attempting to establish a direct rapport between them, Ockham was the first thinker systematically to explore their difference whilst accepting their interdependence. If nominalism means the elimination of universals, Ockham was the opposite of a nominalist, just as if realism means accepting the independent reality of universals, he was the opposite of a realist. He neither excluded concepts from a world in which only individuals were real, nor, like the great majority of his predecessors, sought to explain them as the expression of real natures or essences. In making that distinction Ockham, as Moody was the first explicitly to recognise, 10 was safeguarding concepts from the status of merely mental constructs; he was also safeguarding being from subordination to them. Where the nominalist position denied concepts any epistemological standing, the varying degrees of realism (to employ conventional but, it should become clear, largely irrelevant terminology) allowed no means of distinguishing logically between the mental and the real, if, like universal natures and essences, what was known could only be known conceptually. The distinction between concepts and what they represented then vanishes, and with it the power of differentiating true from false propositions, where the things of which they are affirmed or denied arc not known independently of their propositions. It was towards exposing what he regarded as the falsity of this position that Ockham' s thinking above all tended. His success reversed the direction of schol9

Boehner, CollectedArticles, 33-42; Baudry, Guillaume d'Occa111, 270-1, 286; and 'Les Rapports de la raison et de la foi', Archives 29 (1962), 87 f. 10 E. A. Moody, The Logic of William of Ockham(London 1935; reprinted New York 1965), 37-8.

INTRODUCTION

XXI

asticism. From having been predominantly metaphysical in attempting to extend the area of speculation beyond natural experience, it now came to be focused upon natural experience and the limits upon knowledge which it imposed. Where being had been subsumed under what could be conceived as metaphysically possible, the conceptual was now restricted to what could be known naturally from experience, ( J4 ~ or inferred from what was believed. Even in the increasingly critical atmosphere engendered by thinkers like Duns Scotus and Peter Aureole preceding Ockham, the emphasis had still been upon establishing the direct rapport between concepts and reality, either in an ascending order of abstraction with being as the highest and most universal term, or in the distinctions that could be discerned within actual beings, expressed in the formal distinction of Duns Scotus. Ockham was the first consistently to combine an epistemology based upon the primacy of individual cognition-which as we shall see in the first chapter he adopted from Duns Scotus -with an exclusively individual ontology which had no place for anything beyond or within the individual which was not itself individual. For him the central question was no longer to explain the individual by reference to the universal but rather to account for universals in a world of individuals. How he did so is the subject of the first part of this book. It consisted in treating universals solely as concepts and analysing their role in knowledge logically and grammatically according to the different kinds of terms that can stand for them and the different modes in which they can be employed, ~gnific~lY a_ndnon-signifi~tly. He thereby substituted a logical for a me~physica!__order.In doing so he discarded the long-standing assumption of a pre-existing harmony between concepts and reality, transforming what had been taken as a hierarchy of being into a ""diversityof ~ays_of.signifyiQg individual being~. It was there in displacing the previous modes and assumptions that Ockham's impact lay. If it was destructive of previous systems in exposing the misconceptions on which they were built, and if it in turn encouraged new-although now logical and theological as opposed to metaphysical-speculative extravagances among his successors, it is in my view-and contrary to my earlier opinion-entirely misconceived to regard Ockham as either merely destructive or extravagant. If he did not attempt to substitute a new system-in the sense of an embracing metaphysics and noetic-for those he rejected, his own outlook was itself a comprehensive rethinking of the whole field of scholastic enquiry. As this book will I hope show, Ockham was not a logician devaluing theology and metaphysics; he was no less a philosopher and theologican than his predecessors. He accepted the same framework of knowledge and belief. The difference was that he was concerned with their meaning and evidence to the exclusion of treating their concepts as metaphysical bricks from which to build systems. Ockham was not in that sense a speculative thinker. If any two words could

XXll

INTRODUCTION

be said to characterise his outlook, they are 'meaning' and 'evidence', measured on the one hand by his principle of verification in individual existence and on the other by the contingency of all existence. For Ockham, the entire problem of knowledge centred upon the dualism between the actual and the possible, not in the metaphysical sense of Aristotle and Aquinas, as gradations of being-although they have a place in nature, as we shall consider in chapter nine-but logically and theologically. What has so often been misconstrued as Ockham's scepticism, in substituting what could be for what is, in fact sprang from a Christian awareness of the dependence of everything for its existence and its place in the order of existence upon God as creator and conserver. Combined with it was the recognition of the logical implications of that dependence in God's power to displace, conserve, destroy, or create separately or differently what ordinarily existed in the conjunction in which it was encountered by experience or held on faith. The difference affected the certainty of the entire created order, whether experience of existencethe foundation of all evident knowledge-natural phenomena, or supernatural habits and the economy of grace and merit. We shall encounter all of these aspects. What they show is not a distrust in the reliability of nature or God, but the inherent contingency of all creation and hence the limitations upon natural certainty, in the light of the supernatural certainty of God's ominipotence. Since God cannot act contradictorily or in contradiction of his own perfections, the question of a deceiving God does not arise. The dialectic is not therefore between fideism and sceptism, but between what holds defacto and de inesseand what can be depossibili. It is the main thread in Ockham' s thinking, philosophical, logical, theological and political, expressing the absence of necessity in everything created. However we may regard its consequences, it was essentially the response of a Christian thinker, and at the opposite extreme of the natural determinism which had dominated the arts faculty at Paris in the 1270s. As it concerned knowledge, the problem for Ockham was that if evidence was only of what could be known immediately to exist, and all existence was contingent, how could any evident knowledge give necessary knowledge? As we shall see, it led Ockham to a very restricted view of demonstrative knowledge as universally necessary knowledge, and the substitution over a wide range of questions of only probable arguments or persuasions for what had until then been the accepted as demonstrations. Much of Ockham's criticism of previous thinkers, especially Duns Scotus with whose conclusions he so frequently agreed, was precisely over their failure to recognise the limited efficacy of their arguments and/or the untenability of their concepts. Ockham' s insistence that only propositions which were removed from the mode of existence to the mode of possibility, while bearing upon real existence, could be necessary, and his reduction of real meaning to the signification of real things, changed the whole basis of discourse. It precluded

INTRODUCTION

XXlll

inferring the existence of what was not known, including God, from what was known: in Ockham's terminology intuitive knowledge of one thing does not give intuitive knowledge of something else; it transposed the diversity hitherto attri_buted to being-as universal and individual, essence and exist~-t; th~iversity of terms-abstract, concrete, absolute, connotative-signifying the same individual being diversely; it distinguished between merely affirming one term of another and si gnifyit1;g real things or properties, as well as between essential definitions and necessary propositions; and it d~ied all virtual and formal distinctions which were not real, all evidence of cause from effect, all knowledge of the more universal from the less universal-in short the assu_mptionof a direct order_from the con~ptual to the real. Instead, for Ockham, all knowledge must be ultimately-if it was not already directly-reducible to knowledge of existence. Verification was therefore founded upon experience rather than demonstration, with evidence taking priority over self-evidence. Proper knowledge lay precisely in analysing the logical and grammatical forms of terms, their significative or non-significative role in propositions, and the implicative connection between propositions in syllogisms and arguments. Within the limits of certainty governing the natural order, it cannot be emphasised too strongly that Ockham totally accepted the regularities of nature and the constancy of moral norms. If his was a universe of individuals they were not selfcontained or discrete. The natural order-as well as knowledge of it-was founded upon the uniformity of nature both ontologi~ally_, in the similarities between individuals of the same species and genera, and causally in their dependence upon one another. Nothing therefore could be more misconceived than the older widespread belief that Ockham denied causality or relation in general. What he did was to conceive them empirically, as opposed to logically, as deriving from observation and abstraction. Hence it cannot be logically inferred that one thing is the cause of something else u~f~ th; de -en~eE;_ceof o~ upon the other 11 through temporal succession is al~eady known in existence; and correspondingly withindividuals of the same speci~s. But once known, that- experi~ ~an b~ generalised to all other cases or individuals of the same nature. Such generalisation is the basis of all proper koowledge, ca"ntained in universal propositions; without it, as Ockham reiterated, the way of knowledge would be closed. It is not too much to say that causality andJ similarity are the pivots upon which for Ockham all order and intelligibility turn1 In the same way his conception of the moral order in his doctrine of the virtues and vices was based upon the immutability of right reason as the criterion of what should and should not be done. All good and bad acts consisted in the will freely 11 E. Hochstetter, Studien zur Metaphysik und Erkennt11islehre Wilhelms vo11Ockha,n (Berlin and Leipzig, 1927) was the first to show that systematically. He can be rightly regarded as the pioneer of the new critical study of Ockham.

XXIV

INTRODUCTION

conforming to or rejecting its dictates. Ockham's confidence in the intelligibility of the world and its essential right ordering is nowhere better illustrated than in his confidence in man's power to do God's will expressed in his commandments. It is complemented in his theology, which, as in the rest of his outlook, eschews all unnecessary distinctions and speculations either within God or in his relation to creatures. The difference is that theology is exclusively founded upon faith. Its truths are not therefore susceptible to experience or demonstration, but can only serve as assumptions from which implications can be derived explaining or elucidating their meaning. Ockham takes as given all the articles of faith, both as found in the Bible and among the saints and doctors and, until the time of his flight from Avignon, as defined by the Roman church. His theological seriousness of purpose can hardly be questioned. He employed reason to support faith not only where they were consonant, including persuasion of God's existence from the argument of a first conserving cause, but also where they were discrepant, above all in upholding a formal distinction-itself abhorrent to reason-between the divine essence and the the divine persons, together with God's necessary knowledge of what is contingent. It is that same restricted, non-speculative acceptance of what is given in revealed truth that equally accounts for Ockham' s one area of speculation, namely that involving God's relation to his creatures. For it is governed by the truth of God's omnipotence which for Ockham means his power to do whatever does not involve a contradiction. Hence, just as reason must cede to theological truths which it cannot comprehend, belief must in turn accept theological implications which surpass the ordained limits of the present dispensation. They are all facets of the same body of faith to be taken, like everything known or believed, in their full implications. In their pursuit Ockham cut through the received wisdom in theology as he did in philosophy and logic. It was there that his impact lay. If Ockham had a razor it was in dispensing with all unwarranted assumptions, above all those contained in the systems of his predecessors. They, rather than reason or faith taken by themselves, were the victims of his criticisms. In confining himself to what could be ultimately derived from evident knowledge of individual existence or implied from revealed truth, / he changed the terms of scholastic discourse. However we may regard his effects, scholasticism after Ockham was never again the same.

PART ONE

The cognitiveorder

CHAPTER

ONE

Simple cognition

OcKHAM'sEPISTEMOLOGY is founded upon the primacy of individual cognition. As coming first in the order of knowing, it is the complement to his view of the individual nature of all being. Together they inaugurated a new outlook. Others, notably Duns Scotus-from whom, as we shall see, Ockham derived his own categories of intuitive and abstractive knowledge-had upheld direct cognition of individuals; and the nominalists of the later eleventh century had denied the existence of any but individuals. No one, however, until Ockham sought to explain all knowledge as the outcome of individual cognition while at the same time insisting upon the universal character of all necessary knowledge and the indispensability of universal concepts in its attainment. If we except the limited efforts of Abelard, Ockham was the first thinker to incorporate universal knowledge into an individual ontology, systematically reducing, as we shall consider in chapters two, three, and four, concepts, terms and propositions to their individual import. He thereby reversed the direction which Christian thought had for the most part followed from the time of St Augustine. Instead of asking_how_the_indiyidual derives from a universal nature or essence he sought to explain how ip a world of individuals we~om~ to have knowleqge _which is not individual. What had been an ontological question became a psychological and logical question, to be resolved not by an appeal to metaphysical principles, but conceptually. Ockham was the first scholastic who had no need of a theory of individuation: the individual as the measure of existence was also the measure of what could be known. As it affected cognition, Ockham followed Duns Scotus in making the individual directly accessible to the intellect. This was to repudiate the long-standing belieffostered alike by Neoplatonism and Aristotle-that the proper objects of the intellect were intelligible ideas and concepts freed from. their sensory and individual associations. It carried with it the assumption, made explicit by St Augustine and the Augustinian tradition, that intelligible knowledge of what was universal was superior to knowledge of individuals, reached through the senses. The same notion was expressed in Aristotle's dictum that the intellect apprehends universals but the senses individuals: Intellectus est universalium, sensus autem particularium.1 It was 1

De Anima, rr, eh. 5, 417 b, 22-3. For a discussion of the implications of this doctrine and 2

SIMPLE

COGNITION

3

reinforced by the Aristotelian doctrine of abstraction, widely adopted in the thirteenth century, by which the active intellect in abstracting or disengaging the essence or nature of intelligible species within individual things is able to know these as universal forms or qualities in themselves, freed from their contingent individual associations. As upheld by St Thomas Aquinas this doctrine was taken to mean that only universals can be directly known by the intellect; its knowledge of individuals was confined to their image or similitudointo which sensory knowledge was converted in the imagination. 2 For, as Aristotle also said, 'the soul never thinks without an image'. 3 The justification for confining the intellect to universals was that as an immaterial nature it could only know what is immaterial and hence only what is universal. This, as S. Day has said, expresses a metaphysical a priori view of natures or essencesas in themselves defining the nature of the actions which arise from them. 4 Although enshrined in the Thomist axiom ageresequituresse,it can hardly, however, as Day thinks, be identified solely with medieval Aristotelianism. Certainly so far as the soul is concerned, there was before the last two decades of the thirteenth century no more apparent readiness on the part of Augustinian thinkers than Aristotelians to mingle sensory existence with intellectual understanding. Indeed it is a paradox that the development of the theory of intellectual cognition of individuals came from those who did not accept Aristotle's interpretation that all knowledge came through the senses. If the soul was an autonomous spiritual being it must, as St Augustine held, know everything independently of the senses; hence, by extension, if it were to know individual things outside the soul it must also know them independently and immediately in the way it seized all knowledge. This final corollary did not it seems emerge until the 1280s with thinkers like Matthew of Aquasparta, Peter John Olivi and Vital du Four, and finally, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, Duns Scotus. There seems reason to suppose that it came about partly at least in reaction against the impasse to which the soul's alliance with the body appeared to have led in the opinions condemned at Paris and Oxford in 1277.5 These included many Aristotelian and at Oxford some Thomist propositions concerning the intellect's dependence upon the senses; in particular both before and after these condemnations one of the issues most heatedly debated was precisely St Thomas Aquinas's definition of the soul in Aristotelian terms as the body's form. The subsequent response to such ideas was to reaffirm. the older Augustinian doctrine of the complete ontological separateness of body and soul as distinct beings each having its own separate knowledge. the rejection of it by Duns Scotus and Ockham for direct intuitive knowledge of individuals see S. Day, Intuitive Cognition:A Key to tl,e Significanceof the Later Scholastics(St Bonaventure, New York, and Louvain, 1947). 2 Day, op. cit., 26; Summa Tl1eologiae, r, q. 86 a, I; text quoted in Day. 3 De Anima, m, eh. 7,431 a, 15. 4 Day, op. cit., 129-30. 5 See C. Berube, La Connaissance de l'individuelau nwyen i1ge(Paris and Montreal, 1964), and (New York, 1968), my Paris and Oxford Universitiesin tl,e Thirtee11thand Fourteent/1Ce11turies 222-38.

WILLIAM

4

OF OCKHAM

Duns Scotus developed this to mean that the intellect had two forms of simple or immediate apprehension, one of the existence of individual things and their species, which he called intuitive knowledge, and the other abstractive knowledge by which the individual was known not in itself but by means of an intelligible species or representation in which it is contained. 6 His justification of intuitive knowledge was on the double grounds of experience and the superiority of the intellect over the senses. By the first, intellectual knowledge of individuals was a fact; by the second, the intellect must be able to know individuals because a superior power is capable of whatever an inferior faculty is capable of. He accordingly reinterpreted Aristotle's axiom to mean that whereas the senses can only know individuals, the intellect can also know universals.7 Ockham did likewise; but, as we shall discuss presently, he modified the meaning of intuitive and abstractive to make them both immediately of what was known, whether individuals or universals, rejecting the notion of an intelligible species and all universal essences and natures in abstractive knowledge. With Duns Scotus Ockham agreed that intuitive and abstractive knowledge differed as modes of knowing, not over what was known: intuitive knowledge was existential; abstractive was indifferent to exist~ce. OE_non-~stence. But oZkham ~e~t. beyond Scotus in:-;boliiliing~h~~ pendent standing of all general concepts which for Ockham were the mind's response to knowing many individuals. At the same time both of them went beyond St Thomas Aquinas' s notion of abstraction to the source of concepts, in the intellect's immediate apprehension of individuals. 8 Cognition began there, and not with abstraction from the images previously converted from sensory experience.' What therefore for Aquinas had been the pre-cognitive phase preceding the intellect's formation of concepts, for Scotus and Ockham belonged to the intellect's own cognitive activity. It was coterminous with awareness of existence; but whereas for Ockham that awareness preceded all other knowledge, for Dw1s it could be _ merely independent of other knowledge. ) Finally, Ockham went further still in transforming the status of abstraction from ontological to conceptual. Since for him there was no essence or common nature to abstract from things, what constituted a uni~ersal concept was merely the mind's recognition of similarity among a number of individuals: according to their clegreeof likrn;s~-as weshall ·con~ider in ch;pte~ th;'"e~,ind~i duals were of the same species or genus: neither was an essence inhering in things but a concept predicable of fewer or more individuals. Abstraction therefore becomes the intellect's response to experience of individual existence as opposed to the disengagement of some universal quality or form which has its own-higherl ontological status. Ockham's break with universal natures was thus complete. It meant, as we shall see, the virtual rejection of the medieval neoplatonised conception of Aristotle of which St Thomas Aquinas was the outstanding representative: at virtually no 6 7 8

Day, op. cit., 58. Ibid., 59-60, n7-18, together with Scotus's text. Cf. Day's remarks (ibid., 35).

SIMPLE

COGNITION

5

po!nt either epistemologically or ontologically is there any real rapport between Ockham and Aquinas; and the attempt to find it in their doctrine of abstraction and individual experience of being does so by ignoring the entirely different import which both being and cognition have for the two thinkers. 9 Nothing could be more misconceived than to believe that sensory experience of individuals means direct cognition of individuals: as we have just seen, it does not. Similarly abstraction of an essence is at the opposite pole to identifying individual likeness which ontologiplly remains inseparable from the individuals themselves constituting it. One is real, the other remains a concept. As we shall see in the following chapters, Ockham devoted himself to purging Aristotle's categories of the metaphysical meaning with which so many thinkers from the time of Porphyry and Boethius in the fourth and fifth centuries had invested them.: above all the protean distinction between essence and existence which in the case of St Thomas Aquinas was of pivotal importance. From one standpoint Aquinas and Ockham can be regarded as two different responses to Aristotle whose own unresolved Platonism-exemplified in his theory of abstraction which assumes the inherence of forms in individual things-added to the ambiguity which the accompanying neoplatonist interpretations so enormously increased; their resonance with a Christian conception of being, as deriving from the archetypes or essences of things transmitted by God, gave them an almost unshakeable hold which was strengthened rather than weakened by the application of Aristotelian metaphysics in the thirteenth century. A world of essences, whether self-subsisting and known only in the soul or embodied in individuals and reached through the senses, must give rise to an epistomology of essences. Duns Scotus was no exception; the change which he initiated concerned the way in which the individuals belonging to those essences were known: the essences remained. And it was partly the continued duality between individual and essence which prevented Scotus from reaching the same systematic resolution between intuitive and abstractive knowledge which Ockham achieved. On the one hand intuitive knowledge in being of individual existence was more perfect than abstractive knowledge which was only of an individual in an intelligible species-what Duns called a diminished likeness stopping short of the individual itsel£ On the other hand, for that very reason, abstractive know ledge was alone necessary to conceptual and universal knowledge which could not be of actual existence. 10 Such a view allowed of no rapport between the two kinds of knowledge: they merely represented different modes of knowing individuals non-discursively, one directly in themselves, the 9 The prime example is E. A. Moody's The Logic of William of Ockham (London, 1935; reprinted New York, 1965). This pioneering study ofOckham's logic, to which I am indebted, suffers from attempting on the one hand to make Aristotle an Ockhamist and on the other Ockham a Thomist. Moody's book was written before Day's and from a strictly logical standpoint; it fails to recognise how completely Ockham's doctrine of intuitive individual knowledge separates his outlook from that of Aquinas, and indeed Aristotle. In the case of Aquinas, far from Ockham's epistemology being reconcilable with his, Ockham rejects intelligible species which Aquinas upholds, and upholds direct intellectual cognition of individuals, which Aquinas rejects. 10 Day, op. cit., 74-5.

WILLIAM

6

OF OCKHAM

other indirectly in their species or likeness. The first could not enter into discursive knowledae; the second could not draw upon the first for evident support. Ockha~1 overcame these limitations by taking direct intuitive cognition of individual existence as the point of departure of all other knmvledge, abstractive, discursive, individual, universal, contingent, necessary, and as we shall see in chapter four, self-evident. All were founded upon evident knowledge of individuals because, naturally, individuals were the only reality. Accordingly as Duns Scotus had dispensed ·with the Thomist conversion of images,11 Ockham dispensed with the Scotist intelligible species. All non-discursive cognition must be direct whether intuitively of individuals or abstractively of their representations in the intellect. The two modes were therefore directly related to one another as phases of immediate knmvledge. They differed as evidential and inevidential; and for Ockham the problem of knowledge resided precisely in their difference, namely, according to whether or not something known in the mind could also be shown to exist outside it. If it could it was evident knmvledge; if it could not it was abstractive as some form of apprehension or belief or opinion. Intuitive kno,vledge alone can tell because it alone gives knowledge of real existence. Hence the validity of any knowledge depends upon intuitive knowledge: it is the focus of an outlook which centres upon what can be known evidently, namely the individuals to which all knowledge must be reducible. We must now consider both intuitive and abstractive knmvledge more closely, and their relation to one another and to the images in the imagination ,vhich are derived from the senses. I

INTUITIVE

AND ABSTRACTIVE

KNOWLEDGE

The connection of intuitive and abstractive knowledge with evident knowledge can be seen in the opening question of the Prologue of the Ordi11atio,where both are treated in the conte::-.."t of how evident knowledge is possible. By evident knowledge Ockham means knowledge of a true proposition caused directly or indirectly by knowledge of its terms; as such, evident knowledge is \\'ider than strict or scientific knmvledge (scietttia)-as well as wisdom and what Aristotle called intuitive 12-in being of what is contingent reason or knowledge of first principles (i11tellect11s) 13 and not confined to necessary propositions. Evident knowledge is therefore of whatever can be known to be true; unlike self-evident knowledae :::, whicl1 is immediately engendered from knowledge of the terms of a proposition, to know the 1 ~ Nee est ~a conversio ad phantasmata nisi quod intellectus intelligens uni,·ersale imaginatur smgulare ems (Opus Oxo11.,I, d. 3, q. 6, n. 19, quoted in Day, II6. 12 \Vhich together with art form the intellectual states, or habits, of the soul, Ethics, bk. VI, II3 8 b--II45 a. 13 . Dico quod n~titia eviden~ est cognitio alicuius Yeri comple)..."1,ex notitia tenninorum m