Medieval Philosophy Network, 19th Meeting
3 July 2018
The Bing room | The Warburg Institute | University of London | School of Advanced Study | Woburn Square | London WC1H 0AB
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11:30 - 12:30 Antonia Fitzpatrick (University of Oxford)
“Proper matter and material causation in the thought of Aquinas and the early ‘Thomists"
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch break
14:00 - 15:00 Sophia Vasalou (University of Birmingham)
“Virtue, Value, and the Law in al-Ghazali's Ethics”
15:00 - 16:00 Tianyi Zhang (University of Cambridge)
“Suhrawardī on Light Metaphysics”
16:00 – 16:30 Coffee/Tea break
16:30 – 17:30 Kamil Majcherek (University of Cambridge)
“Ockham’s Theory of Artifacts and its Critics”
17:30 Conference ends
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ABSTRACTS:
"Proper matter and material causation in the thought of Aquinas and the early ‘Thomists’ "
By Antonia Fitzpatrick (University of Oxford)
Aristotle makes matter central to his account of the composition of natural substances and his explanation for the ordered succession of substances in natural change (wine, for instance, corrupts only into vinegar, not into any other substance.) In Metaphysics VIII.4, he says that each substance has its ‘proper matter’. In Physics II.9, he explains that the material principle of natural change must necessarily be in a certain condition in order for a certain substance to come into being. This paper looks at the reception of these ideas in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and his early Dominican interpreters. It makes two arguments. The first is that Aquinas made more of these passages, and had a much more complex understanding of matter, than is generally understood. Aquinas is famous for holding that there is one and only one substantial form in each thing, and, as a corollary of this, that matter has no actuality of its own. And yet, Aquinas does appear to distinguish ‘prime matter’, in a state of pure or undifferentiated potency, from the matter that serves as the material principle in substantial generation. Certain prominent early ‘Thomists’, however, including John of Paris and Hervaeus Natalis, rejected this aspect of Aquinas’s thought on matter, and came close to jettisoning any meaningful account of material causation whatsoever. Why was this? The second argument is that these Dominicans had become convinced, with the help of specific arguments advanced by Franciscans in criticism of Aquinas, that such an account was incompatible with the theory of the unicity of form. Ultimately, then, the paper reflects on the Franciscan contribution to early ‘Thomism’.
“Virtue, Value, and the Law in al-Ghazali's Ethics”
By Sophia Vasalou (University of Birmingham)
The idea that law and virtue, far from being antagonistic as modern philosophers sometimes suppose, are deeply interdependent is as old as the idea that ethics cannot get off the ground without politics. Virtue can only flourish where the right political provisions are made for it. Conveyed from the classical to the Islamic world through a number of textual routes, this idea would assume new forms as the focus shifted from the manmade law of the polis to the revealed law of God. In the work of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, this shift sets the stage for foundational questions about the structure of value. Most simply, his attempt to integrate the virtues into the framework of the religious Law invites a question about evaluative primacy. Are certain character traits virtues—valuable and worth possessing—because they enable us to carry out the acts prescribed by the Law? Or on the contrary, are the acts prescribed by the Law valuable because they enable us to acquire certain character traits? It is the second view that receives the most direct support in al-Ghazālī’s major work, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, where al-Ghazālī takes the Aristotelian maxim “we become by doing” so deeply to heart as to make the value of actions derivative to their character-forming effect. The resulting account forms an important stage in the Islamization of Hellenistic ethics. It is an account not free from tensions; and it is also clear that the road travelled from the manmade laws of the polis to the divine Law has been a long one.
“Suhrawardī on Light Metaphysics”
By Tianyi Zhang (University of Cambridge)
Generally speaking, there are two popular approaches in Western scholarship to reconstructing Suhrawardī’s (d. 1191) Illuminationist philosophy: H. Corbin’s Oriental Theosophy approach, focusing on the mystical elements, and D. Gutas’s Illuminationist Avicennism approach, aiming to prove that Suhrawardī’s philosophy is essentially Avicennan. However, when it comes to Suhrawardī’s light metaphysics, both of these two approaches fail to reveal its philosophical significance. Although several scholars have pointed out the similarity between Suhrawardī’s light metaphysics and Mullā Ṣadrā’s (d. 1640) existential metaphysics, they also commit to the idea that Suhrawardī’s ontological position is the primacy of quiddity, as opposed to Mullā Ṣadrā’s primacy of existence. How can one get around this obvious contradiction? By following the Cave-Story approach I develop, I present an original interpretation of Suhrawardī’s light metaphysics, with a focus on interpreting the rich meaning of light. By looking at Book I of the second part of Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq, I first explain why light is an appropriate subject matter of metaphysics. I argue that Suhrawardī’s ontological position must be the primacy of existence, and light is, in fact, the most important sub-section of systematically ambiguous existence. This is followed by an analysis of Suhrawardī’s fourfold division of all things in the real world: immaterial lights, adventitious lights, dusky substances and states attributed to darkness. Lastly, I reconstruct Suhrawardī’s two-page argument for the existence of immaterial lights and another eight-page argument for the equivalence of immaterial lights to self-apprehenders. I conclude that Suhrawardī’s light metaphysics is a unique metaphysics about particulars rather than universals; it deserves serious philosophical study, and it must in no way be Avicennan.
"Ockham's Theory of Artifacts and Its Critics"
By Kamil Majcherek (University of Cambridge)
My main aim in this paper is to examine William of Ockham's theory of artifacts. According to a view commonly accepted by scholastic authors before Ockham, artifacts are distinct from natural things in virtue of an artificial-accidental form, produced by an artificer. In contrast, Ockham argues that artifacts are not really distinct from natural things, and that there is no need to posit artificial forms in order to account for the production and existence of artifacts, and that what suffices is only local motion of natural things and their integral parts. After presenting the scholastic background of Ockham's theory (the Aristotelian distinction between nature and art, and the distinction between different kinds of artifacts), I focus of Ockham's three main arguments for his parsimonious theory. I also present what I consider to be Ockham's conventionalism regarding the status of artifacts.
In the last part of the paper, I mention briefly some of the objections which were raised against Ockham's theory by later authors defending the realist theory of artifacts: Walter Burley, Nicole Oresme, and Paul of Venice, in whose view Ockham commits the same error regarding artifacts as some of the ancient materialists did with respect to natural things: so that instead of real generation, there is only spatial reconfiguration of pre-existent material components. I shall try to establish how far these and other criticisms of Ockham's theory are justified.