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aristotelian synthesis
[ 105 ]
Ockham held that although there are in individual humans a plurality of sub-
stances, these substances are unified. He claimed that the human person is the
total being of man, not the rational soul alone, which is spiritual and unextended.
Nevertheless, it is because humans have such a soul that they are capable of intel-
lectual endeavors. Since such a soul is simple, it not only lacks parts but even
distinct faculties. So, for instance, what is called the intellect, and is considered
by some to be a faculty of the rational soul, is simply the rational soul’s power to
understand, and what is called the will is simply the rational soul’s power to will.
Although the importance of this move would not be appreciated until much
later, by virtue of such thoughts Ockham was among the first to make the transi-
tion from a faculty to a functional psychology.
Ockham defined person
as an intellectual, complete being that is neither sup-
ported by anything else nor able to join with anything else to form a complete
being. Since the human soul joins with the body to form a complete being, he
agreed with Aquinas that the human soul in a separated form after death is not
a person. Ockham also claimed that although humans experience in themselves
acts of understanding and willing, there is no reason to attribute these to an
immaterial soul (or form). So far as can be determined either from argument or
experience, he said, understanding and willing may simply be bodily activities.
He dismissed Aristotle’s views to the contrary as too ambiguous to be worth
considering. Finally, like Scotus but unlike Aquinas, Ockham maintained that
neither the existence of God nor the immortality of the human soul can be dem-
onstrated. If either is accepted, he said, it must be accepted on faith.
Nicholas de Autrecourt (1300?-1350?), who was associated with the Ockhamist
movement, went even further, developing an empirical account of the self much
like the one for which David Hume would later became famous. According to
Nicholas, individual things are isolated in the sense that neither their existence
nor nonexistence can be inferred from the existence or nonexistence of any-
thing else. He claimed that this truth by itself is enough to destroy all Scholastic
philosophy. Moreover, in his view, substances neither appear to the senses nor
can be inferred to exist by appeal to anything that does appear to the senses.
Nevertheless,
he believed, based on revelation, that each human has a soul,
which is immortal. This belief could not be inferred from experience, he
claimed, which presented not the substance of the soul but only mental states
and acts.
Although Nicholas’s skeptical views were similar in many ways to those of
the Ockhamists, he used skepticism for a different purpose than they had used it,
or than Hume would use it later. The Ockhamists used skepticism to propose a
new empirical basis for science. For Nicholas, the point of skepticism was to
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