![]() Morality is not tied to human flourishing at all. ![]() Scotus rejects the idea that will is merely intellectual appetite, he is saying that there is something fundamentally wrong with eudaimonistic ethics. That’s why Aquinas can understand the will as an intellectual appetite for happiness. But intellectual appetite is free because the intellect deals with universals, not particulars.Īquinas held a eudaimonistic theory of ethics: the point of the moral life is happiness. Sense appetite is not free because the senses provide only particulars as objects of appetite. Intellectual appetite is aimed at objects as presented by the intellect and sense appetite at objects as presented by the senses. ![]() According to Aquinas, freedom comes in simply because the will is intellectual appetite rather than mere sense appetite. Scotus quite self-consciously puts forward his understanding of freedom as an alternative to Aquinas’s. Of course he wasn’t alone in this, but he did bring much of this thought to a head and formulated the beginnings of a set of propositions, concepts, and thought that would shape the historical drift of philosophical speculation on Free Will and Universals up to our time. So from him we get all those thinkers who have reputiated the whole Augustinian tradition of Free Will. He also affirmed that natural law in the strict sense does not depend on God’s will. Of course there are gradations and battlelines to be drawn along the way in this sordid history. Scotus believed there are actual universals existing outside the mind and thereby can be called realist, and he opposed those who deny extra-mental universals and are called nominalists, and whose descendents in our time became the anti-realists of the postmodern turn. ![]() Known as the “the Subtle Doctor,” he left a mark on discussions of such disparate topics as the semantics of religious language, the problem of universals, divine illumination, and the nature of human freedom. View the full series, "Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics", here.Dons Scotus is probably one of the more important philosophers you’ve never heard of (unless you’re an academic or specialist in the field of philosophy). Finally, the third group of essays explores some intriguing, but “weird” implications of the nominalist approach to epistemology in the metaphysics of John Buridan. However, Ockham’s epistemology, worked out in detail by John Buridan, seems to have implications concerning the possibility of “Demon Skepticism” (later popularized by Descartes), which in turn poses a threat to the consistency of the nominalist cognitive psychology in general, as discussed in the second group of essays. The first group of essays concerns issues surrounding the possibility of singular cognition in light of the cognitive psychology of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, as well as the latter’s “argument from indifference” as developed by William Ockham to support his own, nominalist epistemology. This volume presents three sets of papers discussing the medieval problem of singular cognition, nominalist epistemology, and the metaphysics of the great medieval nominalist philosopher, John Buridan.
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