Free Will and the Rebel Angels in Medieval Philosophy

Hoffmann, Tobias

doi:10.1017/9781316652886

Cited by 24 publications

References 88 publications

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The Double Intentionality of Moral Intentional Actions: Scotus and Ockham on Interior and Exterior Acts

Schierbaum

2021

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Any account of intentional action has to deal with the problem of how such actions are individuated. Medieval accounts, however, crucially differ from contemporary ones in at least three respects: (i) for medieval authors, individuation is not a matter of description, as it is according to contemporary, ‘Anscombian’ views; rather, it is a metaphysical matter. (ii) Medieval authors discuss intentional action on the basis of faculty psychology, whereas contemporary accounts are not committed to this kind of psychology. Connected to the use of faculty psychology is (iii) the distinction between interior and exterior acts. Roughly, interior acts are mental as opposed to physical acts, whereas exterior acts are acts of physical powers, such as of moving one’s body. Of course, contemporary accounts are not committed to this distinction between two ontologically different kinds of acts. Rather, they might be committed to views consistent with physicalist approaches to the mind. The main interpretative task in this paper is to clarify how Scotus and Ockham explain moral intentional action in terms of the role and involvement of these kinds of acts respectively. I argue that Scotus’s account is close to contemporary, ‘Anscombian’ accounts, whereas Ockham’s account is incompatible with them.

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The Double Intentionality of Moral Intentional Actions: Scotus and Ockham on Interior and Exterior Acts

Schierbaum

2021

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The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Ethics

2018

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By the end of the Hellenistic period, pursuit of the good life had established itself as the main purpose of philosophy. Academic skeptics argued that each dogmatic school's thought hangs off its view of the human final end and then proceeded to attack all possible systems. 1 Stoics positioned ethics as the crowning gem of their curriculum. Epicureans went so far as to judge theories in physics by whether one could attain tranquility by accepting them.Augustine and Boethius are squarely rooted in this Hellenistic outlook, which makes living well the linchpin of all philosophical undertaking. Just as important was the idea that the best life for a human (Greek: eudaimonia; Latin: beata vita) is a matter of realizing our distinctively human nature. Within the domain of ethics, ideas about living well are ideas about human excellence or virtue (Gr.: arete; Lat.: virtus). These, in turn, are grounded in ideas of human nature within the domains of physics and psychology.While the various Hellenistic schools argued about the details, for the most part they all took this general framework for granted.When Augustine and Boethius depart from this Hellenistic rootstock, it is by grafting on Christian and Platonist ideas, which are sometimes hard to distinguish from each other. The result is a hybrid of sorts, a living system which is what the West later came to accept as Platonism. At the heart of this system is the notion that human beings are metaphysical straddlers: we have one foot in eternity and another in time. When it comes to the good life, the task is to live the best life for us, given the kind of thing we are. In practical terms, this calls us to reorient our lives around eternal norms, even amid the transient concerns of everyday life.The present chapter aims to orient readers to the early medieval

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Williams¹

2018

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Ethics

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Free Will and the Rebel Angels in Medieval Philosophy

Cited by 24 publications

References 88 publications

The Double Intentionality of Moral Intentional Actions: Scotus and Ockham on Interior and Exterior Acts

The Double Intentionality of Moral Intentional Actions: Scotus and Ockham on Interior and Exterior Acts

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Ethics

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