Introduction

This introductory chapter explains how medieval philosophy has hardly made an appearance before in this series of philosophy lectures, and why the author decided on a theme that brings together thinkers from the Middle Ages and the early modern period. It then briefly summarizes the arguments of the three main chapters and of the responses to them.

Divisions of Epistemic Labour: Some Remarks on the History of Fideism and Esotericism

Who can know? Who can merely believe on faith? Who should be kept in the dark entirely? This chapter considers various episodes from the history of philosophy—Locke, Aquinas, Averroes, Maimonides, al-Ghazali—where one or another such division of epistemic labour has been affirmed. It ends by considering the case that can be made for keeping secret some philosophical doctrines.

Faculties of the Soul: Response to Dominik Perler

This chapter seeks to do three things. It raises a few remaining difficulties for Perler's account of the soul and its faculties in Suarez and Descartes. The chapter then proceeds to discuss the early modern critique of faculties and suggests a modest response for the defender of faculty-talk. Faculty-talk, it argues, may serve two modest but useful taxonomic roles in our thinking both about nature and about the mind. The chapter concludes with a discussion of Malebranche's critique of the notion of faculties of the mind, and his contention that the supposed faculties of intellect and will are really distinct neither from one another nor from the substance of the mind itself.

What are Faculties of the Soul? Descartes and his Scholastic Background

Descartes famously claimed that a human soul is a single substance without any parts. But he also affirmed that the soul has two faculties, namely intellect and will, which act as ‘two concurrent causes’. This looks quite puzzling. How can there be two causes in a single and indivisible substance? What is their ontological status? And how do they act? This chapter discusses these questions, paying particular attention to Descartes' scholastic background. It argues that there was no unified scholastic doctrine. Descartes rejected Suárez's theory, which took faculties to be really distinct parts and inner agents of the soul, while defending Ockham's theory, which considered them to be mere ways of acting of a single soul. The two explanatory models gave rise to different accounts of the unity of the soul.

Aquinas on Faith and Knowledge: Response to Robert Pasnau1

This chapter presents some remarks about the previous chapter's portrayal of Aquinas as a fideist, and about the chapter's discussion of weak and soft evidentialism. It highlights two key features of Aquinas' views on faith that make it quite natural to represent him as assimilating it to knowledge and argues that trying to place Aquinas within a taxonomy that largely presupposes an evidentialist approach to knowledge is misconceived.

Essences and Signification: Response to Martin Lenz

This chapter argues that contrary to the thesis of the previous chapter, Locke's theory of meaning, as of knowledge, is explicitly individualistic. He understands a natural language as a construction out of its speakers' idiolects, the terms of which have sufficiently overlapping intensions and extensions for the purposes of common life and coarse communication. But the sciences and systematic natural history require a more precise and determinate ‘philosophical’ language, since both clear thought and effective collaboration in these areas are achievable only by a deliberate refinement of ordinary language in which individuals agree on fixed and common idea–term relationships—i.e., in the case of complex ideas, definitions agreed in the light of careful observation, experiment and reflection. Locke's whole discussion of language is geared to the advocacy of this programme, intended to fill a need without which science could not progress. Locke reasonably assumes shared experience of the world and the possibility of explaining one's meaning to another, in words or ostensively. Although fundamentally individualistic, the model is not readily vulnerable to the commonplace criticisms of ‘mentalism’.

Locke as a Social Externalist

What determines the meaning of linguistic expressions: the mental states of language users or external factors? John Locke is still taken to hold the simple thesis that words primarily signify the ideas in the mind of the speaker and thus to commit himself to an untenable mentalism. This chapter challenges this widespread view and sketches an argument to the effect that Locke should be seen as defending a kind of social externalism, since, for him, it is primarily the speech community that plays the essential role in determining meaning.