The main topic is freewill, but there are a couple of preliminaries and one other topic.
Let's look at the extract beginning at the bottom of p.590. Beside the first paragraph write OPINION. On page 592, beside the third new paragraph beginning "Concerning the solution", write SOLUTION. Beside the beginning of the next paragraph, "As to the first", write "First"; on p.596, two thirds of the way down the page, beside "Having seen the contingency of things", write "second". Skip over the preliminaries, and begin reading on p.592, the fourth new paragraph, beginning "As to the first", reading cursorily. The main point to notice here is that Scotus holds that it is a fact of experience that some things are contingent, a fact that cannot be demonstrated by argument. Now read the first paragraph on p.593. Look back to the argument mentioned in the second sentence, which is in the last two paragraphs on p.591, beginning "It was argued" and "This is now briefly proved". Notice, further down this paragraph, that the intellect knows naturally and necessarily (naturally here is contrasted with voluntarily). According to Scotus, a mind presented with enough evidence cannot help assenting to what the evidence establishes; belief or assent is involuntary. Many would say the same of the will--that if the will, thought of as being like an appetite, is faced with something sufficiently desirable, we cannot help choosing it. Scotus rejects this, as we will see.
Now read the next paragraph "As to the first". The main point about the freedom of our human will is that we can tend either toward any given object, or away from it. We are not drawn irresistibly by any object.
Now read the next paragraph, "There is thus". Notice that Scotus is not saying that the will can make two opposite choices at one instant, both of them, but that at one instant it can make either one of the two opposite choices.
Read the next paragraph, "From this second". This second refers to the second point, beginning three quarters of the way down p.593. This is the third of the points foreshadowed just before the midpoint of p.593. What is meant by composition and division? According to Aristotle (on Sophistical Arguments, ch.20) fallacies can arise from lack of punctuation--"composition and division" means how the words are grouped or divided. The two statements here are: "The will willing A can not will A", and "The will willing A at T can not will A at T". In the sense of composition both are false--i.e. they both need to be divided by some punctuation. Suppose we insert commas before and after "willing A" in the first and "willing A at T" in the second, thus: "The will, willing A, can not-will A", and "The will, willing A at T, can not-will A at T". The second of these is a contradiction, but the first is not; being indefinite about when the volition takes place, it may be true if we specify two different times (the will, willing A [at T1] can not-will A [at T2]). This should make it clear that we are not saying that the will can will both opposites at once.
Read the next paragraph. I don't suppose that helped much, but the point being made is simple enough. If we say that Socrates is sitting but can stand up, we obviously don't mean that he can stand up precisely while he is sitting, doing both simultaneously. We mean that although he is at this time actually sitting, he is quite capable of standing up at any moment. The power to sit and the power to stand are compossible, the acts of these opposite powers are not compossible, but the act of one power is compossible with the opposite power. We don't have a power only when we exercise it. We can't stand while we are sitting, but not because when we are sitting we don't have the power to stand. Scotus goes on to make points like these. Read cursorily to three quarters of the way down p.595, to the paragraph beginning "Along with what has been said".
This discussion of human freedom arose in reference to the point that God causes the world contingently by free choice of his will. Now read the next paragraph beginning "Along with what has been said". But we won't read what he says about the divine will--it is enough to know that he attributes to it also the power of opposites. Now go to two-thirds of the way down p.596, at "Having seen the contingency of things", and read this paragraph. Comment: God's will has determined, freely, that various things will happen contingently at various times, and the divine intellect knows of these determinations of the divine will, and thus knows all contingents. Now read cursorily the next paragraph, "Or", and the paragraph following. We won't worry over the meaning of all this, but notice Scotus's practice of imagining "instants" in God, "instants of nature" as distinct from instants of time, since God does not exist in time: "in that prior instant of nature" (p.597, line 5), and "in the second instant" at the end of that paragraph. Similarly, on p.593, line 11, he speaks of God's intellect having an act "before" his will acts. Scotus pictures the divinity in this way although he holds, not only that God does not exist through time, but also that he is absolutely simple, without part of any kind, so that will and intellect are not different parts of God.
The main point to take from this extract is that human free will is a power for opposites, not only a power to call successively heads and tails, but also a power to call tails at the very instant you call heads--not to make both calls at once, but to have simultaneously two opposite powers and the act of one of them. Ockham will criticise this formulation but will in fact maintain a very similar position.
The next extract is also about freedom of the will. First read the argumenta principalia, the first three paragraphs. The question is, then, whether the will is moved to choice by some other cause, or is self-determined, so that our volitions are within our power. Scotus's position is that the will determines itself. Read the next paragraph, explaining the opinion of a modern doctor, and then two paragraphs down the opinion of an older doctor (Thomas Aquinas). (In the fourteenth century "modern" meant contemporary, and the antiqui doctores were those of a generation or so before.) Skip over now to the solution, and read the last paragraph on p.599, "I say then to the question". Now on p.600 read the paragraph beginning "Also, the intellect acts" and the paragraph after that.
A brief comment. Scotus and others made a division between nature and will. According to him will has a free choice between opposites, whereas a natural power acts in only one determined way, in response to something else determining it to act. According to Scotus (and here he refers also to Augustine) the intellect is such a natural power. But in the second of these paragraphs he notes that Aristotle seems to divide intellect against nature, i.e. to place intellect and will together on the opposite side of the division to nature. Scotus explains that Aristotle means practical intellect, which involves will: it is on account of the freedom of the will that practical intellect can be divided against nature. Thus a medical doctor can use his knowledge either to cure or to kill--a power of opposites; but this is because he can choose to use it one way or the other. As a student of medicine, as a purely intellectual discipline, he cannot help reaching the conclusions to which the evidence points, which means that the intellect acts naturally, nor voluntarily.
We won't read any more of this extract. Sometime you might look at my book Sincerity and Truth: Essays on Arnauld, Bayle and Toleration, pages 38-9, 140-4, 176-82, 195-200, 204-8, which relates to these topics as treated by Scotus and in 17th century French philosophy. I argue there that Scotus is right that the intellect is a natural power, i.e. that beliefs are involuntary, but that this is also true of the will--volitions are also involuntary.
What is the natural law? In short, it is equivalent to morality. Medieval thinkers distinguished various kinds of laws; first the natural law, in some sense divine (since nature is God's creation); then the law of nations, supposed to be observed in all nations; then the law of some particular nation. They also distinguished between natural and positive law. A natural law is one you can recognise as binding just by reflection--your own reason tells you that this is a rule you ought to keep. A positive law is one that is made and announced by a legislator, and not known until the legislator communicates it to you. Thus internal reflection will, supposedly, lead you to realise you should not kill another human being; but only be reading the statute book will you know that in this country you should drive on the left, or that you should pay taxes at such and such a rate. The law of nations and the law of a particular nation are positive laws; natural law is not. Since, they believed, God is the author of our rational nature, God is the author of natural law, which is therefore part of the divine law. But there is also divine positive law; that is, divine law includes natural law, and also divine positive law. Divine positive law included the numerous ceremonial rules that God made for the people of Israel and communicated to them through Moses. Christians believed that these divine positive laws, the ceremonial precepts of the Mosaic law, or Old Law, had been repealed by God when he established a new covenant through Jesus Christ. But some of the rules God gave through Moses were not ceremonial but moral: the moral precepts of the Old Law, unlike the ceremonial precepts, were not repealed; they are part of the natural law, or morality, which holds permanently. Most medieval thinkers held that the ten commandments were part of the natural law. See, e.g. Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1-2, q.100,a.8. Scotus, however, argues in this extract that this is not true of all the ten commandments. Not all of the ten commandments embody permanent principles of morality.
According to medieval thinkers, natural law is permanent, is exceptionless, and cannot be dispensed from, even by God. Scotus's argument that the second table of the ten commandments does not belong to natural law consists in pointing out that God occasionally made exceptions to those rules: therefore they can't be part of natural law. His position seems to be that the second table of the ten commandments are binding because (and to the extent that) God wills us to be bound by them, but God could repeal them, and he might have made another set of laws. This means that such institutions as marriage and property are to some extent positive and contingent and not natural.
In the margin on p.601, last paragraph, "The affirmative position", insert "Opinion". On p.602, the middle of the page, beside "But these explanations" write "criticism of opinion"; on p.603, first new paragraph, "In reply", write Solution. Now read the argumenta principalia, down to the opinion.
That should be clear enough. Now read the first paragraph of the opinion. I don't know whose opinion this was, but what is said in this paragraph was pretty generally held, by Thomas Aquinas, for example, and by Scotus himself. See Thomas Aquinas, Summa theologiae, 1-2,q.94,a.2. Just as in speculation matters there are self-evident basic principles or axioms, which can't be proved and don't need to be, so in practical reasonings there are basic principles self-evident to anyone who seriously reflects on what should or should not be done. Speculative principles are grasped by reason alone. But notice the reference to will in line 4 of this paragraph: intellect and will together recognise the truth that we ought or ought not do certain sorts of things. A practical principle is not an "is" statement but an "ought", and recognition of basic practical principles involves the natural inclination of the will toward the good ("the last end", the ultimate thing aimed at). Besides the basic practical principles there are also inferences from them and these principles and at least the more obvious inferences are the natural law.
Now according to the opinion that Scotus will reject, the ten commandments are among these principles and inferences. So what about the cases where God allowed exceptions? If the ten commandments are part of natural law there should be no exceptions. Read the next two paragraphs. Some comments. He says: "And so no willing which is outside the characteristics of those terms". I take it that he has it in mind that some offences are defined partly in terms of will; a lie, for example, is an intentional deception. So the point is that no act of volition not already allowed for in the terms of the prohibition can be relevant. He speaks of a dispensation with regard to the type of the act: I think this means that if God, for example, tells the people of Israel that they can take away the property of the Egyptians, God's saying so, since he is ultimate lord and owner of all things, makes these things no longer the Egyptians' property, so the act is not theft. God's intervention takes the act out of the category covered by the commandment and leaves the commandment unbroken.
Now read Scotus's criticism of this opinion. In line 3, after "it is", insert "either".
Pass on now to Scotus's solution. Read the first two paragraphs. He is saying that since the commandments of the second table are not part of the natural law, there is no reason why God should not make dispensations.
Read now the rest of the extract. Here he says that while the commandments of the second table are not absolutely necessary and exceptionless, they are neverless generally consonant or harmonious with the values protected by natural law.
Notice the implications for property rights. "You shall not steal" is not part of natural law, because the institution of property, though in harmony with natural law, is not absolutely necessary. Most medieval writers, including Scotus, treat property as an institution of positive law--in contrast with John Locke, who says that it exist by the law of nature. On this topic see William of Ockham, Short Discourse on the tyrannical Government...of some who are called Highest Pontiffs (Cambridge U.P. 1992), pages 87-94. On Ockham's theory of natural law see p.101, and see William of Ockham, A Letter to the Friars Minor and other Writings (Cambridge U.P. 1995), p. 286 ff.
Scotus's treatment of the ten commandments was a contribution to a discussion going on at the time about the relation between God and morality. Scotus seems to hold that natural law does not rest on God's revocable commandments--it is precisely because God can and sometimes did revoke (at least for the occasion) some of the ten commandments that they are not part of natural law. However, Scotus and his contemporaries and successors wondered what limits there were on God's power to command. See Coplestone's volume on Scotus, chapter 50. See also my paper "Natural Law and Will in Ockham" .
Scotus does not write well, he is not clear; he does not have a good sense of what readers need to be told, and in what order, to make the argument easy to follow. But you may agree, on reflection, that he is a subtle, original and courageous thinker. He doesn't give the conventional answer. He challenges widely accepted theories and produces arguments unlike any those his predecessors had used, in favour of new conclusions. Of course every philosopher worth reading does these things, but Scotus does them in high degree.
We will turn now to Ockham, who also has in high degree the same characteristics of subtlety, originality and intellectual courage. In addition, he writes, I think, clearly and with pedagogical skill.
I will say a little about his life. For more see McGrade's "Introduction" to the volume mentioned a while ago, A Short Discourse. (See also Ockham and his Dialogue. His life and writings fall into two distinct phases, before and after the year 1328, when he went into opposition against the pope of the day, Pope John XXII. He was born perhaps around 1285; he would thus have been about 15 years old when Duns Scotus was teaching in Oxford. Ockham himself studied in Oxford; he was bachelor of theology there just before 1320. As bachelor of theology he produced a Commentary on the Sentences, which is his main work in philosophical theology. During the next few years he seems to have taught in a Franciscan school, perhaps in London. During this time (probably) he produced a major work on Logic, Summa logicae. In 1324 he was called to Avignon, then the papal court, to answer criticisms of the orthodoxy of some of the theses maintained in his Commentary on the Sentences. After some time, however, he came to agree with some of the leaders of his order, the Franciscans, that Pope John XXII had fallen into heresy. In 1328 he broke with this pope and spent almost 20 years campaigning, unsuccessfully, for the deposition of John XXII and his two successors, Popes Benedict XII and Clement VI. He died, still excommunicate, in 1347. His writings after 1328 were all concerned with this controversy with the popes: they include contributions to political philosophy (which we don't touch on in this course), but he never wrote again on the topics he had written on before 1328. While he campaigned against the reigning popes he was excommunicate and persona non grata in most places, but his pre-1328 philosophical and theological works continued to circulate and to be read and discussed in the Arts and Theology faculties of universities. Until recently historians of thought attributed to Ockham an immense influence, often regarded as harmful, on late-medieval thought. These days historians see him more as one of a number of people moving more or less independently in similar directions, and it has been noted (e.g. by William Courtenay and Catherine Tachau) that some of those usually regarded as Ockham's disciples rejected (on good grounds) some of his most characteristic theses. So his work is not the basis of fourteenth century thought; but it is certainly a good example of what was going on.
Ockham rejects this. What will happen tomorrow, as formulated in a future-tensed proposition, such as "there will be a sea-battle tomorrow", is already true and its contradictory is already false--though in the case of contingent propositions we don't yet know which of the contradictories is true and which false. The truth or falsity of a statement about the future is determinate, because it will be either true or false.
Now read section B, which begins the statement of an opinion held by others. Some comment: compare Scotus, Hyman and Walsh, pp.592-3, down to "on the second point".
Now read section C, which continues the statement of this opinion. This corresponds to Hyman and Walsh, pp.593-594 down to "From this second", and the bottom quarter of p.595 down to the paragraph "Having seen the contingency" on p.596.
Now read section D. This corresponds to H&W, pp.596-7. The symbolism "x will be at t", is due to the translators, not to Ockham. It means "such and such a thing will happen or exist at such-and-such a time". More literally, Ockham says: "that that will be at a", where "a" is a time reference. The "opinion of others" in this question is the opinion of Scotus, condensed, mostly in his own words. Now read section E, which begins the criticism of this opinion. Pause. You will want to say, of course, that Scotus has already answered this objection, in H&W p.595, para. "To this I reply". He says, "For I have at once the power for opposites, but not for opposites at once". The power for opposites which he posits is not a power to produce both opposites at the one instant. I think Ockham is being unfair to Scotus. Still, there is a difficulty in Scotus's position. Recall the thought experiment presented in H&W, p.593, near the bottom of the page. Scotus wants to say that a will that lasted only for an instant has at that instant a power for opposites; it wills heads, but at that instant has the power also to will tails. I ask: for what instant does it have this power? At this instant it has the power to will tails when? If it lasts only for an instant it will never have another opportunity. So if there is to be a power of opposites not involving sucession, then that does after all seem, whatever disclaimer Scotus makes, to be a power to will opposites at the same instant; and this is how Ockham is taking it.
The paragraph "suppose that" amounts to this: Suppose it is said that contradictories won't both be true, because if one is true the other is false. So if "it does not will" is true, "it wills" is false.
Answer: In fact, the other will be not just false but impossible, so the will does not have even the possibility of willing in that instant the opposite of what it does will in that instant. Why is it not just false but impossible? Because, in reference to the past, a true proposition is necessary and its contradictory is impossible. Yesterday, my catching the bus this morning was possible, and so was the opposite; but if I did in fact catch the bus this morning, the opposite--that I did not catch the bus this morning--is impossible. This is on Aristotle's doctrine of modality, according to which the contradictories of true factual propositions about past and present are impossible. I think the translators are right in what they suggest in footnote 10. Yesterday my not catching the bus this morning was not true, but merely possible.
The point of the reference to God unmaking the past is this. Even if God could do that, it would still in future be true to say that it was whatever it was before he unmade it, because it was. Even if God can unmake the past, he can't change the truth value of statements about the past. In a parallel passage to this one (on p.73 of Adams and Kretzman), Ockham makes no reference to God. He simply says that every true proposition about the present, even a contingent proposition, has foreover in the future a corresponding necessary proposition in past tense. "I am speaking now" at this moment has corresponding to it from now on the necessary proposition that I was speaking at that moment.
So Ockham does not accept Scotus's claim that his position does not mean that the will can will opposites at once. On Ockham's view this is what an instantaneous power of opposites without succession would have to mean, and if such a power were actualised contradictories would be true simultaneously, so it can't be actualised, ever, so it is not to be posited.
Now read section F. "t-1" translates Ockham's "a"--"the will wills this at a". The second "a" should be "b" and the "t1" should be "t2" because it is another instant: "At one instant "the will wills X at t1" will be true, and at another instant "the will does not will X at t2" will be true". In the last two paragraphs of this section, starting from "(b)", we have Ockham's reformulation of Scotus's theory. Version (a) is impossible, but (b) makes good sense: the will causes contingently, and freely, because it can cease from its present act of will at the next instant without any variation occurring in itself or anything else. ("Occurring" translates adveniente, which means coming upon, presumably from without. Ceasing to will is a variation, but it need not be caused by something outside the will.) So with the rest of the universe, apart from my act of will, remaining the same, I can switch from willing to not willing. There is a succession, but no cause of the change except my will. This is of course a rejection of determinism; "in that way it is not a natural cause". But Ockham does not hold that at the one instant we have power for opposites, both for that instant.
Read section G. This section explains what he means by "without any variation".
Read section H. This applies the argument to the divine will. Notice Ockham's rejection in passing of the "instants of nature" that Scotus often talked about. Elsewhere Ockham criticises this notion more at length.
Read section J. This criticises Scotus's account of how God knows future contingents, namely by knowing his own acts of will (look back to section D). Note the point on p.88: if our will is self-determining, then God can't know what we will do by knowing his own volitions.
Now read K. The contradiction is that God does not have evident cognition and does have evident cognition. Scotus treats this as not a contradiction because these statements are true in different instants of nature. But according to Ockham there are no instants of nature, "no process or priority" in God.
Read L. This is formally the author's answer to the question. God does know future contingents, but we can't understand how. In the next section he will suggest how it might be so, based on the theory of Boethius.
Now read M.
Notice that Ockham rejects Aristotle's view that statements about the future are neither true nor false.
Notice that Ockham says that God is a single intuitive cognition etc. The medieval thinkers generally hold that God is identically all that he is and all that he does, since there is absolutely no composition in God. But generally they use anthropomorphic language about God that seems to imply that there is composition. Ockham often uses language that avoids this implication and reminds us of God's simplicity.
Notice that God knows not because future contingents are present to him, or through ideas or reasons or through anything else: he knows simply through himself without anything else present. In fact, even in human intuitive cognition Ockham denies that the object need be present or that there need by any species or representative forms in the mind.
Read section N. In this section he seems to adopt in application to God the position of Duns Scotus which he had earlier rejected in application to creatures. There are other instances where he does something similar. For example, although he rejects Scotus's formal distinction in creatures, he accepts it in God--that is, like Scotus, Ockham says that in God there is some formal non-identity although God is absolutely simple and really self-identical. Ockham is forced into this position by theological considerations. Unlike Scotus--and this is a very striking difference of intellectual "style"--Ockham is not prepared to extend to creatures, to import into philosophy, a theory designed to meet theological exigencies. That certain things that are true of creatures are not true of God, and vice versa, is one of Ockham's recurrent themes. So here he says that God has a power of opposites without succession--not in the sense of composition, i.e. that God can actually will both A and not A together, but in the sense of division--that from eternity God has power to will A, and also has power to will not-A, and further that if God wills A it is possible that he should have willed not-A (i.e. he has the power to will not-A). According to Ockham, as for all Christian and Muslim theologians, and for their neo-Platonist predecessors, God or the highest reality is outside of time, not involved in succession. If his volitions are not necessary but free (as all Christians held) there must be in him some freedom or contingency or power for opposites not involving succession. Ockham accepts this position, and sees no way of improving on Scotus's theory of it. But he won't apply it to created wills, in which there is succession: our freedom can be adequately explained as a self-sufficient power to reverse our choice at a later instant.
Finish reading this distinction. Two points that emerge are