Abstract
Ockham pioneered a radical revolution in psychology. One reason he could do so is that the science of psychology at Oxford in his day was not provided with foundations, on two counts. First, there was much less institutional pressure at Oxford to address these foundational problems, as a result of the way the curriculum was structured there (as opposed to the University of Paris). Second, psychology was not a good match for the kind of science that was developing at Oxford at the time. The upshot was that Ockham found it easy to give an alternate grounding for psychology.
All translations are mine.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Like all of Aristotle’s scientific works, psychology as sketched in the De anima does not conform to his model of (ideal) science laid out in the Posterior Analytics, instead being a mix of exploratory approaches, generalizations from collected data, and more or less speculative proposals about how to deal with specific issues. On this score psychology is no more problematic than physics or botany.
- 3.
Analogous difficulties apply to metaphysics and to physics. In the case of metaphysics, Aristotle’s response is well-known: although being is said in many ways, its pros hen equivocity allows us to focus on substance out of all the categories, and of substances that which is most substance of all; hence metaphysics is a single science unified by the special role of the First Unmoved Mover. In the case of physics, motion is an instance of change in quantity or quality or place, with change in substance as a related special case.
- 4.
There is a subtle point here. It might be thought that living beings fall under change-in-quantity, since they exhibit growth. True enough; when living beings change in quantity, their kinematic behavior follows the laws of physics. But so does the behavior of nonliving beings when their quantity changes. This does not carve out anything special about living beings, in particular about growth, as is required for Aristotle’s science of life, which identifies the interesting feature of growth to be a change in quantity partly due to internal principles and partly due to assimilating nutritive matter.
- 5.
If we take circles as the limit of inscribed n-sided regular polygons, which in turn is the genus of squares and triangles, we can unite the study of squares and circles – though at the cost of making their study something other than geometry (limiting cases of shapes are not part of geometry proper).
- 6.
This did not go unnoticed; ancient commentators on Aristotle’s De anima address these problems, but their work, with few exceptions, was unknown in the Latin West.
- 7.
- 8.
Chart. Univ. Par. §11 (Denifle 1889, 70): “Nec libri Aristotelis de naturali philosophia nec commenta legantur Parisius publice uel secreto, et hoc sub poena excommunicationis inhibemus.”
- 9.
Chart. Univ. Par. §20 (Denifle 1889, 78–79): “Non legantur libri Aristotelis de metaphysica et de naturali philosophia, nec summae de eisdem.”
- 10.
Chart. Univ. Par. §78 (Denifle 1889, 138): “Et libris illis naturalibus, qui in Concilio prouinciali ex certa causa prohibiti fuere, Parisius non utantur, quousque examinati fuerint et ab omni errorum suspitione purgati.”
- 11.
Chart. Univ. Par. §87 (Denifle 1889, 143–144). The precise charge was to excise anything “erroneous, scandalous, or offensive” they found in reading the books in question so that what remained could be studied safely (“ibi erronea seu scandali uel offendiculi legentibus inueneritis illatiua, penitus resecetis ut quae sunt suspecta remotis incunctanter ac inoffense in reliquis studeatur”).
- 12.
Chart. Univ. Par. §90 (Denifle 1889, 145–146) is a letter from Gregory IX to King Louis of France written on 6 May 1231 which commends William of Auxerre, saying among other things that he had worked in Rome “to reform the curriculum” pro reformatione studii; this may refer to the charge of the commission.
- 13.
Wood (2001) argues that the first complete De anima commentary that we have dates from almost exactly this time – she attributes to Richard Rufus a commentary found in a Parisian manuscript written ca. 1240.
- 14.
Chart. Univ. Par. §201 (Denifle 1889, 228), in a long list of required texts (“Item librum De anima semel audiuerit uel sit in audiendo, sicut praedictum est”).
- 15.
Chart. Univ. Par. §246 (Denifle 1889, 278): “Librum De anima, si cum naturalibus legatur, in festo Ascensionis; si autem cum logicalibus, in festo Annunciationis Beatae Virginis.”
- 16.
See de Boer (2013, 58–60) only Brito’s questions on Book III of the De anima have been edited as of yet.
- 17.
See Tybor (1967) for an overview of John of Jandun’s account of psychology.
- 18.
Jean of Jandun, Quaestiones De anima, fol. 11: “Anima intellectiua secundum se et absolute et secundum quod est. principium motuum et operationum in homine pertinet ad naturalem et non ad metaphysicam, qui solum considerat totaliter separata.”
- 19.
See Köhler (2000, 352–383) for a discussion of earlier views on the subject-matter of psychology.
- 20.
This late text of Burleigh’s has not yet been edited, but Paul Bakker has transcribed a list of the questions it deals with, which is what I am relying on here.
- 21.
See Synan (1997).
- 22.
Tachau (1988, 233 n. 90) remarks that “Oxford De anima commentaries from the 1320s have not been the object of scholarly attention.” Small wonder.
- 23.
See Weisheipl (1964) for details on the structure of education at Oxford.
- 24.
Gibson (1931, 26, ll. 8-10): “Tres etiam libros naturales, scilicet librum Physicorum, librum De anima, librum De generatione et corruptione, iurent se audiuisse.” Swearing that one has attended lectures is of course not quite the same thing as attending lectures.
- 25.
Gibson (1931, 32 ll. 5-13): “[…] nisi prius iuret se legisse cursorie duos libros logicales ad minus, unum de ueteri logica et alterum de noua, uel ambos de noua et unum de libris naturalibus, uidelicet libros quatuor Caeli et mundi, uel tres libros De anima, uel quatuor libros Meteororum, aut duos libros De generatione et corruptione, uel librum De sensu et sensato cum libris De memoria et reminiscentia et De somno et uigilia, uel librum De motu animalium cum duobus libris de minutis naturalibus.” See Weisheipl (1964, 159 n. 51) for the interpretation of the last three words as referring to the treatises that make up the parua naturalia.
- 26.
See Johnson (2015) for a recent account of Aristotle’s system of sciences which argues that he has a single unified theory of the sciences.
- 27.
Tachau (1988) is still the classic study of these issues. It is possible that at Oxford they thought that psychology was itself a hybrid: it contains some truth about perception largely due to optics, some truth about the intellective soul largely due to metaphysics, and so on, but no single branch of study covering it all.
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King, P. (2017). The Science of Psychology in Ockham’s Oxford. In: Pelletier, J., Roques, M. (eds) The Language of Thought in Late Medieval Philosophy. Historical-Analytical Studies on Nature, Mind and Action, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66634-1_20
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