Medieval Philosophy: Duns Scotus and Ockham

NP 101 or 102 or 103 or 112

The purpose of this subject is to enable you to study some of the metaphysical ideas, and the theories of knowledge, of a group of seventeenth-century philosophers, themselves deeply influenced by Platonism, whose work has influenced everything that has been done since. Their ways of dealing with philosophical questions are different enough from those now current to provide a stimulating set of alternatives well worth reflecting on; later philosophers who have rejected their conclusions have frequently underestimated the force of the considerations that led them to these views. Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche and Leibniz are often called "rationalists", because they all held that we have a capacity for purely rational thinking, independent of sense-experience, by which we can achieve an understanding of the world and of our place in it. They differed considerably in what they took this to imply, and as a result held radically different views on the nature of the world. Spinoza for example argued that there is really only one genuinely individual thing, or "substance", which could be equated with God or Nature; Leibniz held that there are infinitely many substances, all of them (in a sense) mental. Gassendi was a vigorous opponent of rationalist thinking in any form, holding knowledge to be grounded on sense-experience, and in consequence very limited in extent. You do not have to know the work of all these authors in equal detail; in the examination you have to show knowledge of at least three of them.

R. S. Woolhouse, The Concept of Substance in Seventeenth-Century Metaphysics (Routledge)