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aristotelian synthesis
[ 103 ]
a vehicle for personal immortality.
19
In a futile attempt
to make his view more
palatable to the ecclesiastical authorities, Siger appealed to a principle interpreted
by some as involving the double-truth theory, according to which something
could be apparently true according to rational philosophy but false religiously.
Aquinas, by contrast, felt that rational philosophy should not produce any appar-
ent truths that conflict with religious faith. His attack on the Latin followers of
Averroës who thought otherwise, including Siger, may have played a part, as
did
the church’s official censures, in motivating Siger to change his view. But once it
arose, the double-truth theory was not so easily expunged from Scholastic and
Renaissance thought.
Late Scholastic Philosophy
John Duns Scotus (1265-1308), from the town of Duns, in Scotland, became a
Franciscan while he was at Oxford. He then went to the University of Paris,
where he argued against Aquinas’s views. A follower of Augustine, Scotus was
sympathetic to Neoplatonism. He claimed that not all substances are composed
of matter and form. Angels and human souls, whose existence he accepted partly
on faith, are simple incorporeal substances. In opposition to Aristotle and Aquinas,
he denied that matter is a principle of individuation: “In the order of nature, the
soul [whether or not it unites with matter] is an individual in virtue of its own
singularity.”
20
But what accounts for the “soul’s singularity”? Scotus’s answer
was that an individual person—Socrates, for example—is individuated from its
species—human—by a purely formal “individual difference”:
thisness
(
haecceitas ).
The same, he said, is true of souls.
But Scotus was not entirely opposed to Aquinas. According to Scotus, matter
must be a positive entity, quite apart from its form. It follows that God could
have created matter without form, and had God done so, it would have existed
in a way analogous to that in which Aquinas thought that angels or human souls
exist without matter—that is, it could have merged with existence.
In retrospect, one can see that over the years theological Scholastic philosophers,
in order to maintain Christian Platonic commitments, tended to get more and more
permissive in their Aristotelian ontologies: Bonaventure could not conceive of
form existing without matter, and so felt required to postulate spiritual matter in
order to accommodate the idea that there are disembodied souls. Aquinas could
conceive of form existing on its own without matter but not of matter existing on
its own without form. Scotus could conceive of either form or matter existing on its
own, without the other.
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