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Duns Scotus on Common Natures And DUNS SCOTUS ON COMMON NATURES AND “CARVING AT THE JOINTS” OF REALITY A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate School of the University of Notre Dame in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Andrew C. Helms ______________________________ Richard Cross, Director Graduate Program in Philosophy Notre Dame, Indiana March 2016 © Copyright 2016 Andrew Chad Helms DUNS SCOTUS ON COMMON NATURES AND “CARVING AT THE JOINTS” OF REALITY Abstract by Andrew Chad Helms Despite the puzzles of interpretation it engenders, John Duns Scotus’s theory of common natures is widely cited as an example of scholastic “realism.” Common natures serve a variety of functions in Scotus’s system, providing the “real unity” which serves as the subject for Aristotelian science. The “proper passions” of substances – characteristics which serve to identify substances by type, but do not formally belong to the essence of a subject – are ontologically dependent on common natures according to kind. And Scotus operates on the assumption that it is the description of created subjects according to their common natures which is the most fundamental description of them. Thus, for Scotus, common natures and their relations determine what we might call the “structure” of reality. But not every “subject of a science” is a common nature. According to Scotus, “being,” the subject of “metaphysics,” does not have the same real unity as the natural groupings under the ten categories of Aristotle. As a consequence of this, the “transcendental passions of being” include predicates which do not possess the “real unity” of a common nature, because they are too abstract or generic to do so. I will Andrew C. Helms undertake three primary tasks in this dissertation. First, I will provide a description of the role of common natures in Scotus’s system. Then, I will discuss the rule or criterion by which Scotus posits common natures to account for certain cases of univocal predication – as opposed to cases of univocal predication for which he doesn’t posit common natures. Ultimately, I will discuss the difference between two types of “structure” in Scotus’s system: the case of distinct “quidditative components” in the essence of a subject, and the case of a subject and its passion. In both cases, the relata are “formally distinct.” In the former case but not the latter, they are related by “act-potency composition.” Ultimately, common natures explain the structure in the created world, but not every relatum in a structural relation is a common nature. To AmyRose Castillo Helms, whose patience and love made this dissertation possible. ii CONTENTS Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………..v Introduction…………………………………………………………….………...………..1 Chapter 1: Duns Scotus on When to Posit a Common Nature………………..…...….…32 1.1 The Role of Common Natures………………………………...…..................38 1.2 The Scope of Common Natures: Supremacy of the Categories….………….43 1.3 The Scope of Common Natures: Sufficiency of the Categories…….….……58 1.4 The Nature of Real Agreement………………………………………………64 1.5 The Divine Essence: An Infinite Common Nature…………………………..67 Chapter 2: Some Varieties of the Real Relation of Similarity…………………………...70 2.1 Similarities Classified According to Foundation…………………..….……..74 2.2 Similarities Classified According to Structure……………………...……….86 2.3 Correlation of the Preceding Classifications……………………….………...94 2.4 Similarity between God and Creatures: The Vestige………………………...98 2.5 Similarity to God vs. Dependence on God…………………………………103 Chapter 3: Natural Properties vs. “Perfections Simpliciter” ………….………………..109 3.1 Overview: Ontological and Semantic Divisions……………………………113 3.2 Categorial Predicates Imply Limitation and Naturalness…………..............118 3.2.1 Categorial Predicates Imply Limitation…………………………..118 3.2.2 Categorial Predicates Track the Natural Properties………………122 3.3 Perfections Simpliciter Do Not Imply Limitation…………………….…….130 3.4 Perfections are not “Natural Properties” in sense (2)………………………134 3.5 Can Theological Predication be “Fundamental”?..........................................146 3.6 Conclusion………………………………………………………………….149 Chapter 4: Is Scotus a True Aristotelian? Challenges to the Fundamentality of Aristotelian Substance..............................151 4.1 The Goal of Aristotelian Science: Describing Reality Fundamentally……..154 4.2 Parsimonious, Paradigmatic, & Profligate Aristotelianisms………………..161 4.3 “Metaphysical Miracles” and Scotus’s Aristotelianism……………………167 4.4 Assumption and Fundamentality…………………………………………...184 4.5 Carving at the Joints, Fundamentality, and Natural Properties…………….187 iii Chapter 5: Structure and the Object of Science………………………………………..193 5.1 A Metaphysical Framework: Cataloguing Scotus’s Distinctions…..............197 5.1.1 Scotus’s Taxonomy of Distinctions………………………………198 5.1.2 An Ordering of Scotist Distinctions………………………………211 5.2 Scotus’s Account and Taxonomy of Aristotelian Science………………….225 5.2.1 Objects of Sensory Powers……………………………………….225 5.2.2 Objects of Sciences……………………………………………….230 5.3 The Formal Distinction and the Proper Object of Aristotelian Science........244 5.3.1 The Case of Dimensive Quantity…………………………………244 5.3.2 The Case of the Transcendental “One”…………………………...246 Chapter 6: An Account of Creative Causality.......……………………………………..251 6.1 Scotus on Creative Causality……………………………………………….253 6.2 Scotus on the Nature and Content of the Divine Ideas……………………..266 6.3 The Divine Ideas, Possibility, and Potency………………………………...276 Conclusion …………………………………………………………………………..…281 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………..………..288 iv ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not have been completed without the gracious support and friendship of many individuals. The philosophical communities at the University of Notre Dame and at Texas A & M University gave me a wonderful place in which to learn the methods, goals, and etiquette of philosophical exchange. All the philosophers who were members of my dissertation committee at one time or another – including Richard Cross, Stephen Dumont, Fred Freddoso, Therese Cory, John O’Callaghan, and Sam Newlands – contributed valuable insights and raised questions that challenged me and benefited the project. I am especially grateful to Richard Cross, who donated many of his afternoons to initiate me into Scotus’s Ordinatio and freely gave me papers to read, tips about where to find important Scotus texts, and suggestions for improving my work. Any errors which remain in the work are my own. Several philosopher friends, including Eric Hagedorn, Philip Swenson, Ron Belgau, Matt Getz, David Pattillo, and many others, gave me practice in honing my discussion and presentation skills. I am also grateful to my wife, AmyRose Castillo Helms, to my parents, Douglas and Selah Helms, and to my family for their forbearance and generous love through the entire progress of my graduate studies. v INTRODUCTION Nominalists hold that the metaphysical machinery which universals involve is always too heavy to warrant the theoretical expense of positing universals. According to nominalists, a proper scientific ontology would reject such strange, multiply-located entities as universals are supposed to be. But perhaps at least some of the theoretical costs of universals can be mitigated by a policy of economy with respect to universals. Whether or not he is motivated by such considerations, Duns Scotus posits common natures corresponding to some univocal predications, but not others. In this, he is like some contemporary realists, who posit universals for some predicates, but not for others. Thus, if Scotist common natures are equivalent – or at least sufficiently analogous – to the “immanent universals” posited by contemporary realists like D. M. Armstrong, then we may say that Scotus restricts his appeal to universals to explain a (relatively) small class of predications.1 This means that Scotus is a “sparse property theorist” rather than an “abundant property theorist.” But, if one is a sparse realist, then how should one determine which cases of predication warrant explanation in terms of a universal or a common nature? The answer one gives to this question is the meta-theory which logically precedes the project of identifying the predicates that correspond to universals. In the discourse of some 1 D.M. Armstrong, Universals: An Opinionated Introduction (Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1989), 84-87. An important difference between Scotus’s “common nature” and Armstrong’s “immanent universal” is that Scotus holds that a common nature is not “numerically single,” but has its own “real less than numerical unity.” Cf. Martin Tweedale, Scotus vs. Ockham: A Medieval Dispute Over Universals, vol. 2 (Edwin Mellen, 1999), 396-397. 1 contemporary realists, this project is also described as the project of finding the “natural properties” – which, in some accounts, are identified with the properties that “carve at the joints” of reality.2 In this broad outlook, it is at least a necessary condition for “naturalness” that a property be not “gerrymandered.” This approach suggests that if universals are ever theoretically warranted at all, then we should only posit the universals that belong to the smallest set of candidate universals which is needed to underwrite all of the predications in the class of predications that are taken to be the “natural” or the “joint- carving” predications.3 Some possible elaborations of this basic idea are that we should only posit universals to explain
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