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William of Ockham on Artifacts

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William of Ockham on Artifacts Zupko, J. 2018. “Nothing in Nature Is Naturally a Statue”: William of Ockham on Artifacts. Metaphysics, 1(1), pp. 88–96, DOI: https://doi.org/10.5334/met.7 RESEARCH “Nothing in Nature Is Naturally a Statue”: William of Ockham on Artifacts Jack Zupko University of Alberta, CA [email protected] Among medieval Aristotelians, William of Ockham defends a minimalist account of artifacts, assigning to statues and houses and beds a unity that is merely spatial or locational rather than metaphysical. Thus, in contrast to his predecessors, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, he denies that artifacts become such by means of an advening ‘artificial form’ or ‘form of the whole’ or any change that might tempt us to say that we are dealing with a new thing (res). Rather, he understands artifacts as per accidens composites of parts that differ, but not so much that only divine power could unite them, as in the matter and form of a proper substance. For Ockham, artifacts are essentially rearrangements, via human agency, of already existing things, like the clay shaped by a sculptor into a statue or the stick and bristles and string one might fashion into a broom. Ockham does not think that a new thing is thereby created, although his emphasis on the contribution of human artisans seems to leave questions about the ontological status of their agency open. In any case, there are no such things as natural statues, any more than there could be substances created by human artifice. Keywords: artifact; substance; parsimony; per se unity; per accidens composite; human agency Every summer when I was a boy, my mother and father would pack us into the car at our home in Ontario and we would make a long journey west, to Saskatchewan, to visit my grandparents and enjoy several weeks under the endless prairie skies. Needless to say, the journey there and back also seemed endless, especially to us kids. So my parents enlivened the trip with sightseeing along the way. One of their favorites was the famous ‘Sleeping Giant’ in Thunder Bay, Ontario: basically a rock formation along the southern tip of the Sibley Peninsula which, when seen from the city to the West, looks like a human figure lying on its back; indeed, it was so identified in Ojibway legend, well before Europeans arrived in the area. I remember looking forward to seeing the Sleeping Giant for the first time with great anticipation, imagin- ing it as some giant statue of a man. But it was difficult to contain my disappointment when I finally saw it. The view was spectacular, to be sure, but it didn’t look to me at all like a giant, sleeping or otherwise. I kept thinking that I wasn’t looking at it the right way, but no matter how hard I squinted, it still looked to me like a rocky peninsula jutting out into Lake Superior, which is what it was (my mother finally ‘decoded’ the giant’s parts for me after I sheepishly admitted I couldn’t see it). As it turned out, as a graduate student reading medieval texts on natural philosophy some years later, I discovered I was not alone. William of Ockham (c. 1285–1347) would have been a sleeping giant-denier too, for he bluntly asserts that there are no such things: “nothing in nature is naturally a statue [nulla res naturalis est naturaliter statua].”1 In this, he follows most medieval readers of Aristotle’s Physics, who knew that the Philosopher distinguishes sharply between natural things and artificial things, or things that lack 1 William of Ockham, Summula Philosophiae Naturalis I, cap. 20 (in William of Ockham 1984: p. 211, ll. 63–64); hereafter ‘Summula’, by book and chapter of the text, plus page and line numbers of the edition (OP = Opera Philosophica). All translations are my own. We do not know when this treatise was composed, but presumably it dates from Ockham’s teaching career at Oxford or the Franciscan custodial school in London. Zupko: “Nothing in Nature Is Naturally a Statue” 89 any “innate impulse to change.”2 For medieval Aristotelians,3 natural things such as trees and dogs and humans are paradigmatic substances, each having a real essence and constituting something one per se, whereas artifacts such as brooms and beds and houses have only a per accidens unity, meaning that their for- mal structure has been imposed upon them by an external agent, the artisan, who reconfigures natural ‘raw’ materials into something that serves her own contingent purposes. Artifacts are not substances because substances, or ‘natures’, stem from God’s will in creating the universe; human artisans lack the power to create any new natures, although they can imitate nature, as Aristotle says (Phys. II.2, 194a21). Accordingly, artifacts must have a different, which is to say lesser and derivative, ontological status. Despite their agreement that artifacts are not substances, however, medieval Aristotelians argued a lot about how artifacts are constituted metaphysically. Might we speak of an artifact as acquiring its unity from an accidental or ‘artificial’ form, even though it lacks a proper essence? If so, an artifact might be said to have multiple forms, in keeping with its several stages of production or perhaps multiple purposes. Thus, Thomas Aquinas (1225–74), commenting on Aristotle’s famous axe example from De anima II.1 (412b15) – “as it is, it is an axe” – speaks about artifacts as having accidental, “artificial forms,” as opposed to the natural forms they would have if they were substances belonging to the created order.4 But William of Ockham rejects this, taking the more the more parsimonious line that artifacts are not new things but merely contingent collections or arrangements of things of old things, i.e., natural things which already exist, and furthermore that the per accidens unity exhibited by artifacts is merely spatial or locational and so not even worthy of the name ‘form’. There are no artificial forms on Ockham’s view. In what follows, I will provide a brief reading of one text in which Ockham defends this minimalist account of artifacts, exploring some of the theoretical movitations behind it.5 I will then consider whether it is really as ontologically low-impact as Ockham seems to think, given his well-known commitment to avoid multiply- ing entities beyond necessity.6 Artifacts in the Summula Philosophiae Naturalis Ockham deals with the question of artifacts in Chapter 20 of his Summula Philosophiae Naturalis, or “Compendium of Natural Philosophy.”7 In the Prologue, he describes the work as offering a comprehen- sive treatment of natural philosophy according to Aristotelian principles, explicitly committing himself to treating natural science “on the basis of Aristotle’s views [secundum intentionem Aristotelis]” rather than the truths of the Catholic faith.8 This comment is unremarkable among fourteenth-century authors. Aristotle’s Physics was a required text for the bachelor’s degree at medieval universities, and, much like today, the undergraduate curriculum was focused on providing students with the literary and scientific training they would need to go on to study in one of the graduate faculties: Law or Medicine or Theology. Far from radically endorsing pagan science for all, Ockham is simply indicating here that he has written the trea- tise primarily for those who are studying natural philosophy for the first time. But Ockham’s Summula 2 Aristotle, Physics II.1, 192b18; tr. Hardie and Gaye in Aristotle 1984: vol. 1, p. 329. 3 It should be noted that other than a handful of logical works translated by Boethius, the full Aristotelian corpus was not available in Latin until the latter half of the 12th century, after which it took another 50 years or so for Aristotle’s works to become part of the Arts curriculum at medieval universities and fully understood. The ‘medieval Aristotelians’ I refer to here were active between the second quarter of the 13th century and the mid-14th century. 4 Thomas Aquinas, Sentencia libri De anima II, lect. 2, n.3: “And because substantial forms, of which sort are the forms of natural bodies, are hidden, <Aristotle> clarifies this <question of the soul’s nature> through artificial forms, which are accidental [Et quia formae substantiales, cuiusmodi sunt formae corporum naturalium, sunt latentes, manifestat hoc per formas artificiales, quae sunt accidentales].” The term “artificial form [forma artificiale]” is not to be found here or elsewhere in William of Moerbeke’s Latin translation of Aristotle’s De anima, which Thomas was using. For discussion of Thomas’ rather complicated views on artifacts, see Rota 2004. 5 The usual medieval locus for questions about artifacts was the large and metaphysically sophisticated genre of mereology, or part/whole composition, to which Arlig 2015 offers a superlative introduction. For Ockham’s theory of composition more generally, see Cross 1999 and Normore 2006. 6 We actually find the razor explicitly cited in this connection in another work of natural philosophy, the Brevis Summa Libri Physi- corum: “in the generation of artificial things, no new thing is produced that is really distinct from a natural thing; but due to local motion, there is a new designation, which is called ‘generation’, broadly speaking. And the reason for this is that a plurality of things should not be posited unless it is necessary to do so [in generatio artificialium non est productio alicuius novae rei distinctae realiter a re naturali; sed propter motum localem est ibi nova denominatio quae vocatur generatio, largissime loquendo. Et huius causa est quia plura non debent poni sine necessitate]” (Brevis Summa II, cap. 1 (Opera Philosophica VI, p.
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