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John Duns Scotus on Parts, Wholes, and Hylomorphism John Duns Scotus on Parts, Wholes, and Hylomorphism <UN> Investigating Medieval Philosophy Managing Editor John Marenbon Editorial Board Margaret Cameron Simo Knuuttila Martin Lenz Christopher J. Martin VOLUME 7 The titles published in this series are listed at brill.com/imp <UN> John Duns Scotus on Parts, Wholes, and Hylomorphism By Thomas M. Ward LEIDEN | BOSTON <UN> Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ward, Thomas M. John Duns Scotus on parts, wholes, and hylomorphism / by Thomas M. Ward. pages cm. -- (Investigating medieval philosophy, ISSN 1879-9787 ; VOLUME 7) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-90-04-27831-8 (hardback : alk. paper) -- ISBN 978-90-04-27897-4 (e-book) 1. Duns Scotus, John, approximately 1266-1308. 2. Hylomorphism. I. Title. B765.D64W37 2014 111’.1092--dc23 2014018273 This publication has been typeset in the multilingual “Brill” typeface. With over 5,100 characters covering Latin, ipa, Greek, and Cyrillic, this typeface is especially suitable for use in the humanities. For more information, please see www.brill.com/brill-typeface. issn 1879-9787 isbn 978-90-04-27831-8 (hardback) isbn 978-90-04-27897-4 (e-book) Copyright 2014 by Koninklijke Brill nv, Leiden, The Netherlands. Koninklijke Brill nv incorporates the imprints Brill, Brill Nijhoff, Global Oriental and Hotei Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Koninklijke Brill nv provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910, Danvers, ma 01923, usa. Fees are subject to change. This book is printed on acid-free paper. <UN> For Katie ∵ <UN> It all seemed too good to be true. Hither and thither through the meadows he rambled busily, along the hedgerows, across the copses, finding every- where birds building, flowers budding, leaves thrusting—everything happy, and progressive, and occupied. ~Kenneth Grahame, The Wind in the Willows … <UN> Contents Acknowledgements ix Abbreviations x Introduction 1 1 The Purpose of Prime Matter 6 i Distinguishing Matter from Form 6 ii Motivating Matter: The Argument from Change 8 iii Why Must Matter Persist through Change? 12 iv Matter as Passive Power 18 v Obediential Potency and the Subject of Passive Power 23 2 The Ontology of Prime Matter 27 i Matter as Subjective Potency 27 ii A Shifting Opinion about Matter’s Separability from Form 30 iii Particular and Total Separability 34 3 How Matter and Form Compose a Substance—Part I 41 i Forms as Parts 43 ii Matter and Form as Essential Parts 47 iii Degrees of Unity 48 iv Existence is not Enough 51 v Making a Difference 52 4 How Matter and Form Compose a Substance—Part II 60 i Producing Substance from Matter and Form 60 ii Causal and Co-Causal Relations 62 iii Innovating Aristotle’s Principle about Relational Change 66 iv The Identification of Parthood Relations with Causal Relations 68 v The Causality of Matter and Form 70 vi Dispensing with Total Separability? 72 vii Conclusions: Composing, and Composing 73 5 Scotistic Pluralism about Substantial Form—Part I 76 i Unitarianism and Pluralism about Substantial Form 78 ii Scotus against Unitarianism 81 iii Scotus against Standard Pluralism 84 iv An Inconsistent Position about the Form of Corporeity? 90 <UN> viii 6 Scotistic Pluralism about Substantial Form—Part II 94 i The Special Potency Question 97 ii Essential Orders 98 iii Essentially Ordered Unity 103 iv The Role of Soul in Scotus and Two Unitarians 106 7 Contingent Supposits and Contingent Substances 110 i Three Modes of per se Being 112 ii Ockham on the Distinction between Substance and Supposit 115 iii What’s Special about Supposits? 118 iv Arbitrary Part-Substances? 121 8 The Mereological Status of the Elements in a Mixture 125 i Mixed Opinions about Mixtures 127 ii The Argument from Quantitative Forms 132 iii The Generation and Corruption Argument 137 iv The Violence Argument 139 v Generation from the Elements 140 vi Mixtures and Organic Parts 142 9 Why the World is not a Substance 145 i Motivating Monism 148 ii The Argument from the Distinguishing of Forms 151 iii The World/Organism Analogy 158 iv Properties of the Whole that are not Properties of the Parts 161 10 Scotistic Hylomorphism and the Problem of Homonymy 165 i Scotistic Hylomorphism Among Other Varieties 165 ii Ackrill’s Problem 169 iii Aquinas’s Response 171 iv The Standard Pluralistic Response 173 v Scotus’s Response 177 vi Scotus, Aquinas, and the Ultimate Subject of Substantial Change 178 vii Faulty Metaphysics or Faulty Chemistry? Scotistic Hylomorphism and the Four Elements 179 Bibliography 183 General Index 189 <UN> Acknowledgements I would like to thank the midwives of this project, Calvin Normore and Marilyn McCord Adams. Normore supervised my dissertation at ucla, on which this book is based; Adams supervised my M.Phil thesis at Oxford and then offered supererogatory support as a member of my dissertation committee. They are primarily responsible for forming me into the kind of philosopher I have become—deficiencies in the product are the fault of the material rather than the efficient causes! Thanks also go to the other members of my dissertation committee, John Carriero, Brian Copenhaver, and Debora Shuger. Richard Cross deserves special mention, both for his personal encouragement of some aspects of the project and for his scholarly work on Scotus, which has been indispensible for developing my own ideas about Scotus, as all readers of this book could easily discover for themselves. I have had helpful feedback from Joshua Blander, Sean Kelsey, Gavin Lawrence, jt Paasch, Robert Pasnau, Martin Tweedale, Scott Williams, and from my colleagues here at lmu, in particular Jim Hanink, Christopher Kaczor, and Eric Perl. John Marenbon invited me to consider revising my doctoral thesis for publication in Brill’s Investigating Medieval Philosophy Series, of which he is the general editor; I thank him for suggesting the idea and for his uplifting feedback. I am grateful to audiences at the Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic conference in Prague, the Ontology of Relations: the Medieval Contribution workshop in Lausanne, the Unum, Verum, Bonum conference in Lisbon, the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, mn, and in my own department, for feedback on different portions of the book. Thanks also go to Terence Sweeney for help with the index. For dif- ferent reasons I am grateful to The Johns Hopkins University Press for permis- sion to use my “Animals, Animal Parts, and Hylomorphism: John Duns Scotus’s Pluralism about Substantial Form,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 50:4 (2012), pp. 531–558, which is almost totally reprinted here as Chapters 5 and 6. For the privilege of having philosophy as my labor I am grateful to the Mustard Seed Foundation, the ucla Department of Philosophy, the ucla Graduate Division, and the lmu Bellarmine College of Liberal Arts, which have funded the research for this project at different times over the years. I am grateful to the librarians of the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome for permission to use the Library for last-minute corrections to the proofs. Finally, and closer to home, I want to thank my grandparents and parents for their support, patience and constant encouragement; and Katie, Edith, and Sophia, for love and distraction. T. M. Ward Los Angeles June, 2013 <UN> Abbreviations Reportatio Duns Scotus, Reportatio Parisiensis QMet Duns Scotus, Quaestiones super Libros Metaphysicorum Aristotelis OTh William Ockham, Opera Theologica OPh William Ockham, Opera Philosophica Vatican Duns Scotus, Opera Omnia, published by Typis Vaticanis Wadding Duns Scotus, Opera Omnia, edited by Luke Wadding Bonaventure n Volume n of Duns Scotus, Opera Philosophica, published by The Franciscan Institute, St. Bonaventure University Barnes n Volume n of Aristotle, Complete Works, edited by Jonathan Barnes Wolter Duns Scotus, De Primo Principio, edited and translated by Allan B. Wolter, O.F.M. <UN> Introduction Let me introduce you to Mr. Mole, or Mole, for short. He is an animal, an individual member of some species of talpid. He is therefore a material object. He has material parts: paws, heart, liver, eyes, fur, snout, and so on. According to Duns Scotus, if you add all these material parts together you have not tallied the sum of Mole’s parts. In addition to these he has another part, a soul, and this part has a special role to play. It endows all Mole’s material parts with a certain kind of unity—substantial unity—that they would not have were it not for that soul. In short, Mole’s soul makes the difference between there being, on the one hand, some talpid parts and, on the other, the living, breathing Mole. Call all of Mole’s material parts his matter, or hyle, and his soul his form, or morphé. Mole is therefore a hylomorphic composite, a composite of matter and form. Medieval philosophers would have classified hylomorphism as part of a theory of physics, since physics, according to them, is the discipline which studies things undergoing change and only things undergoing change are hylo­ morphic composites. Nowadays we would classify hylomorphism as a meta­ physical theory. What exactly we would mean by calling it a metaphysical theory is not clear, because we contemporary folks do not have a consensus about what metaphysics is. Part of what we would mean, however, is that hylo­ morphism, if true, is a theory about material objects that could be neither con­ firmed nor denied by any empirical science.
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