Five-minute digest
A History of Philosophy, Vol. III: Ockham to Suárez
Summary
Frederick Copleston published Ockham to Suárez in 1953 as the third volume of his History of Philosophy, carrying the story from the death of Duns Scotus in 1308 to the generation of Francisco Suárez, who died in 1617. The Continuum reissue of 2003 renamed it Late Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy. The period it covers had often been treated as a dull interval between Aquinas and Descartes; Copleston argues instead that it was the workshop in which the tools of early modern thought were forged, though he does not hide his judgment that much of the forging was done by taking the medieval synthesis apart. The first part concentrates on the fourteenth century. Copleston prepares the ground with Durandus and Peter Aureoli, Dominican and Franciscan critics of the older schools, and then gives William of Ockham a long sequence of chapters: his life and quarrel with Pope John XXII, his terminist logic and denial of real universals, his account of intuitive knowledge, his natural theology and ethics, and his political polemics. The thread Copleston keeps in view is Ockham's stress on divine omnipotence and freedom, which in his reading tends to make the moral law depend on God's will and to narrow what unaided reason can prove about God. He then follows the movement Ockham set going: the sceptical arguments of Nicholas of Autrecourt and John of Mirecourt about causality and substance, the impetus physics of John Buridan and the mathematical work of Nicole Oresme at Paris, the secular political theory of Marsilius of Padua's Defensor Pacis, and the speculative mysticism of Meister Eckhart, Tauler, Suso, Ruysbroeck and Gerson. The second part turns to the Renaissance. Copleston treats the Florentine Platonists, the quarrels among Aristotelians at Padua, and Nicholas of Cusa, whose learned ignorance and coincidence of opposites he presents as a bridge between medieval and modern habits of mind. Philosophers of nature such as Telesio, Campanella and Giordano Bruno, the theosophy of Jakob Böhme, the astronomy and mechanics culminating in Galileo, and Francis Bacon's program for an inductive science follow. A chapter on political philosophy sets Machiavelli beside Thomas More and carries the subject toward Bodin, Hooker and Grotius. The third part describes the revival of scholasticism in sixteenth-century Spain and Italy, including Cajetan, Francisco de Vitoria on the law of nations, and the controversies over grace and freedom, and closes with two chapters on Suárez's Disputationes Metaphysicae and his treatise on law. Copleston argues that this second scholasticism was more than a rearguard action: Suárez's metaphysics was studied in Protestant as well as Catholic universities, and his account of political authority as given by God through the community entered early modern debate. For students, the volume is most useful one chapter at a time, read beside the primary texts of More, Machiavelli, Bacon and Vitoria already in this library. It records where Copleston, writing as a Jesuit and a Thomist, thinks a line of argument went astray, and those judgments are clearly separable from the exposition that precedes them.
Top Lessons
What follows from God's absolute power?
Ockham distinguished what God can do absolutely from what he has ordained. Copleston shows how this distinction, meant to protect divine freedom, also loosened the link between the world's order and what reason can prove. Students can see how a theological emphasis shapes a whole philosophy.
Names, natures and the razor
Ockham denied that there are real common natures shared by individuals; universals are signs that stand for many things. Copleston expounds the logic carefully before asking what becomes of natural kinds and natural law if only individuals exist.
Mystics in a fragmenting age
Copleston places Eckhart, Tauler and Ruysbroeck beside the logicians to show that the fourteenth century also sought God through prayer and detachment. He separates their devotional aim from the bold phrases that drew censure.
Statecraft and the commonwealth
Machiavelli and More wrote within a few years of each other. Copleston's chapter lets students compare a manual for holding power with an imagined commonwealth that judges European custom, and then see how Suárez and Vitoria grounded authority in law.