Philosophy of Mind in the Early and High Middle Ages

The History of the Philosophy of Mind, Volume 2

Margaret Cameron

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN:
  9780429019593
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Medieval & Renaissance Philosophy

Philosophy of Mind in the Early and High Middle Ages provides an outstanding overview to a tumultuous 900-year period of discovery, innovation, and intellectual controversy that began with the Roman senator Boethius (c480-524) and concluded with the Franciscan theologian and philosopher John Duns Scotus (c1266-1308). Relatively neglected in philosophy of mind, this volume highlights the importance of philosophers such as Abelard, Duns Scotus, and the Persian philosopher and polymath Avicenna to the history of philosophy of mind.

Following an introduction by Margaret Cameron, twelve specially commissioned chapters by an international team of contributors discuss key topics, thinkers and debates, including:

• mental perception;
• Avicenna and the intellectual abstraction of intelligibles;
• Duns Scotus;
• soul, will, and choice in Islamic and Jewish contexts;
• perceptual experience;
• the systematization of the passions;
• the complexity of the soul and the problem of unity;
• the phenomenology of immortality;
• morality; and
• the self.

Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind, medieval philosophy, and the history of philosophy, Philosophy of Mind in the Early and High Middle Ages is also a valuable resource for those in related disciplines such as Religion.

1
Peter Abelard on Mental Perception

Margaret Cameron

1 Introduction

Peter Abelard (1079–1142) follows Aristotle’s view that all understandings are in the first place generated on the basis of sense experience. But he also recognizes that we seem to be able to generate understandings of many things of which we have had no previous or current sense experience whatsoever; indeed, for some things sense experience would be altogether impossible. For example, we have thoughts about fictional characters such as chimeras and centaurs. Understandings about the past and future and about incorporeals such as the soul and God present similar problems. Moreover, as an anti-realist about the ontological status of universals, Abelard noted that nonetheless we seem to be able to make true statements using generic and specific words. How is this possible if we do not sense universals (because they do not exist) and thus lack the corresponding understandings?¹ What, if anything, do we understand in these cases?

In response to this question, Abelard advanced an innovative, proto-phenomenological theory of mind. According to this theory, in addition to the physical capacity to see individual corporeal objects using our sense organs, the mind possesses its own ability to see with the mind’s eye. According to Abelard, human understanding, which is the highest cognitive power (beyond reason, memory, imagination and sense experience), is able to attend to mental objects and consider them otherwise than as they appear to us in reality. There are constraints: an object cannot be attended by the mind in any which way whatsoever, as we will see. Once the mind attends something otherwise than as it exists in reality (“seeing as” as an act of mental attention), then reason is able to form a judgement about whether or not what is understood is true. This ingenious twelfth-century theory shares much in common with the phenomenological theories advanced in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries by Brentano and Husserl. Brentano was self-conscious about his theory of intentionality’s medieval origins; the theory’s core feature was named after the later scholastic term for thought, “intentio”.² But that heritage is wholly distinct from Abelard’s theory, which apparently did not gain traction for a number of contingent historical reasons. My primary interest in this chapter is to identify the ancient sources that inspired Abelard’s own theory, and more narrowly to investigate the language of mental perception that lies at its foundation. Abelard turned to three well-known ancient writings available to him in the early twelfth century: Boethius’ Commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge and his Consolation of Philosophy, as well as Augustine’s On the Trinity. King (1982) first emphasized the importance of acts of attention in Abelard’s philosophy. The explicit link with Augustine’s theory was elaborated by Rosier-Catach (2004). Their interpretations of Abelard on attention differ considerably from one another, and my own differs from both of theirs. Without access to Aristotle’s De Anima, which was first translated into Latin in the late twelfth century (and even then it took a number of years before it began to be seriously studied), Abelard is left to come up with a theory of mind, ultimately rooted in sense experience, that can account for our true understanding of things that have no correlates or denotata in the reality that we presently sense.

2 Boethius on understanding universals

In his presentation of the problem of universals at the start of his commentary on Porphyry’s Isagoge, Boethius (ca. 475–ca. 526)³ encountered a particularly difficult philosophical problem, one that became very well known to his medieval readers, including (among others) Peter Abelard. After setting out Porphyry’s famously unanswered questions about the status of universals, that is, of genera and species, Boethius articulates the particular dilemma he faces:

For everything the mind understands, it

• either intellectually conceives what exists constituted in the nature of things, and it describes it to itself by reason,
• or the mind paints for itself by empty imagination what does not exist.

(Spade 1994, 20)⁴

The problem so articulated is epistemological. If universals are constituted in the nature of things, then we can intellectually conceive them as they are. But if universals are not constituted in the nature of things, which Boethius in fact argues is the case, then what, if anything, is understood with regard to universals? This dilemma crescendos to the following question: “Therefore, the question is, to which kind does the understanding of genus and the other predictables belong?” (160, 6–7). Boethius’ answer provides a glimmer of a theory which is then richly developed by Abelard to explain how we can have true understandings of things that present themselves otherwise than as we grasp them by sense experience.

Boethius tries to respond to the questions left wholly unanswered by Porphyry at the very start of his Isagoge, namely, whether universals exist or not, whether they are corporeal or incorporeal and, if incorporeal, whether they subsist in connection with bodies or not. “As for genera and species,” Porphyry says,

I shall decline for the present to say (a) whether they subsist or are posited in bare understandings only, (b) whether, if they subsist, they are corporeal or incorporeal, and (c) whether they are separated from sensibles or posited in sensibles and agree with them. For that is a most exalted matter, and requires a longer investigation.

(Quoted in Spade 1994, 20)⁵

Drawing from what is said in Aristotle’s Categories, Boethius assumes that for a universal to be common to several things, it must be common in its entirety, at one and the same time, and as the very substance (or, as Spade 1996, 3 put it, “metaphysically constitutive”) of the particulars it is in. There have been many analyses of Boethius’ answers to these questions, and most scholars agree there are two, if not three, distinct arguments that result in the conclusion that universals do not actually exist in the world.⁶ For this reason, Boethius has been characterized as an anti-realist about the ontological status of universals.⁷ But this just dissolves the first horn of the dilemma, since universals turn out not to exist as constituted in the nature of things. If genera and species do not exist in reality, then (following the dilemma mentioned earlier) does the mind “paint for itself by empty imagination what does not exist”?

Boethius repeats the dilemma in a different formulation:

Do we understand species and genera as we do things that exist, from which we take true understanding? Or do we delude ourselves when we form for ourselves, by the vain thought of the mind, things that do not exist?

(Spade 1994, 20-21, my emphasis in italics)

Having argued that universals do not exist, then what is happening with our understanding of them? Are we deluded? Are they merely empty or vain thoughts, and so no thoughts at all? Boethius recognizes that thoughts, or understandings (intellectus), are generated either by the way something is or by the way it is not (cum omnis aut ex re fiat subiecta ut sese res habet, aut ut sese res non habet), to which he adds, “for no understanding can arise from no subject (nam nullo subiecto fieri intellectus non potest).” Moreover, according to Boethius, “what is understood otherwise than the thing is is false (id est enim falsum quod aliter atque res est intellegitur)” (163, 6–10). How, then, can we have veridical, sound understandings of what we do not have sensory experience of in reality? This is the central question.

Since Boethius has argued that universals do not exist, then it seems to follow that we would have but an empty understanding of them; worse, because it is empty it is entirely false. In what follows in his commentary, Boethius mounts a case for the claim that, while genera and species do not exist in reality, nevertheless our understandings of them are neither empty nor false. To do so, Boethius needs to convince us that we can have true understandings of things otherwise than they are in reality, or otherwise than as we perceive them by sense experience.

In his Commentary on Isagoge, Boethius’ language is rich with perceptual imagery; there is no doubt that this imagery had a strong influence on Abelard. Despite the imagery, however, Boethius fell short of advancing either a clear argument or a theory of any kind to account for the phenomenon. He simply indicates, using analogies and examples, what seems to be happening in the mind to give rise to a true understanding of universals imperceptible to the senses.⁸

For Boethius, as for Abelard, as we shall see, nature constrains what can and cannot be soundly understood: “If one puts together by the understanding what nature does not allow to be joined, no one fails to recognize that that is false. For example, if someone joins a horse and a man in imagination, and portrays a centaur” (Spade 1994, 23). There is thus something detectable in nature – but not detectable by sense experience. It is detectable by means of the mental operation of abstraction which, according to Boethius, can produce understandings that are true and sound. He provides as an example of this process the abstraction of a line from a body: the line cannot exist without the body, yet the mind can abstract it as if it could.

Our focus is narrowly on the way Boethius describes this process of abstraction using the language of mental perception. According to his description, what the senses contribute to understanding is “confused and mixed up” (Spade 1994, 24) but the mind “gazes on and sees the incorporeal nature by itself ”:

In this way, when the mind takes on these things all mixed up with bodies, it divides out the incorporeals and gazes (speculatur) on them and considers them.

(Spade 1994, 24)

The perceptual verb at work here is speculari, meaning “to spy out, watch, observe, examine”.⁹ But what, exactly, does the mind “see” when it identifies the incorporeal, i.e., the genus, in the corporeal that is sensed? Boethius illustrates his point with an example:

For example, from single men, dissimilar among themselves, the likeness (similitudo) of humanity is gathered. This likeness, thought by the mind and gazed at truly, is the species.

(Spade 1994, 24)

As stated earlier, Boethius’ explanation does not rise to the level of being a theory of mental perception, although clearly and consistently Boethius describes the operation of the mind in terms of perceptual language. The mind has its own view: it can see likeness (similitudo) among things that present as unlike to visual perception and the other physical senses. This likeness is not produced by the mind. Rather, the mind’s gaze is uniquely able to identify likenesses. Mental perception of things’ likeness provides the understanding of the universal, otherwise invisible. On this thin metaphor, Abelard begins to build his theory. In the end, however, Boethius is content to rest with the view that we can sometimes generate truths on the basis of a reality that is perceived and experienced otherwise than it is, admitting, “For not every understanding is to be regarded as false that is grasped from subject things otherwise than as they themselves are disposed” (Spade 1994, 24).

3 Cognitive hierarchy in Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy

Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy, written when the fifth-century author was in prison awaiting his execution, had a surprising and significant impact on Abelard’s thought. There are two important points of influence: first, Boethius’ d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Notes on contributors
• General introduction
• Introduction to volume 2
• 1 Peter Abelard on mental perception
• 2 The problem of intellectual cognition of material singulars between 1250 and 1310
• 3 Avicenna and the issue of the intellectual abstraction of intelligibles
• 4 Duns Scotus on freedom as a pure perfection: necessity and contingency
• 5 Soul, will, and choice in Islamic and Jewish contexts
• 6 Perceptual experience: assembling a medieval puzzle
• 7 The systematization of the passions in the thirteenth century
• 8 Soul and agent intellect: Avicenna and Aquinas
• 9 The complexity of the soul and the problem of unity in thirteenth-century philosophy
• 10 The phenomenology of immortality (1200–1400)
• 11 Morality
• 12 The self
• Index