John Duns Scotus claims theological discourse is univocal, having concepts of God that are applicable to creatures. This would seem to neglect the divide between creator and creation. Yet, Scotus repeatedly claims our concepts of God are irremediably confused, in a manner similar to a grasp of an infima species that conceives only its genus, as if we knew of human beings merely that they were a type of animal. Perhaps our concepts of God are confused because theological discourse is univocal. For Scotus, language has its signification from creatures. Though like Aquinas, Scotus believes concepts referred to God should not connote creaturely imperfections, Scotus likewise allows that God’s infinite being precludes what signification remains from accurately representing the divine essence. Because theological discourse preserves in part notions drawn from experience, it is univocal, referring to God without any alteration whatsoever, but for this very reason, our understanding of God is confused.
The overall purpose of this paper is to show that according to Aquinas, acts of free decision (liberum arbitrium) are not only rational, but also contingently caused by the person. If free decisions originate in the persons contingently, then the question is which power of the soul acts as a contingent cause: the intellect, the will, or both? At first glance, Aquinas seems to deny that the will is a contingent cause, since it is a passive power whose activity depends on the intellect. Does he hold, then, that the intellect is a contingent cause? Aquinas’s position vis-à-vis this problem will be discussed in connection with a commonplace of 13th-century philosophy, according to which the will is freer than the intellect. The “voluntarist” critics of Aquinas even hold that the intellect is not free at all. This view poses a serious challenge to Aquinas’s account of free decision, for whom free decision rests on the freedom to have different practical judgments. The paper will begin with an outline of the historical development of the problem of the freedom of the intellect from Philip the Chancellor to Duns Scotus. Then it will examine how Aquinas addresses this challenge.
In this paper, I propose a way of resolving an alleged contradiction in Aquinas’s account of human cognition. Sometimes Aquinas claims that the proper object of the human intellect is material quiddity embodied in objects able to be sensed; at other times he suggests that the proper object is universal truth and being. If Aquinas is in fact committed to the former claim, this has troubling theological and metaphysical implications; if he is committed to the latter claim, this raises problems for his Aristotelian commitment to an abstractive account of human knowledge. I resolve the dilemma by distinguishing two senses of ‘proper object’ in Aquinas’s thought. The proper1 objects of the intellect are the material quiddities which the intellect can distinctly cognize. But this is compatible with asserting that there is another set of objects which are proper2 objects of the intellect insofar as the intellect can indistinctly and confusedly cognize them; these are immaterial quiddites which correspond to ‘universal truth and being.’
Avicenna famously wrote in his Metaphysics that “horseness is just horseness.”[1] He was talking about the nature of horses “in itself” or “taken absolutely.” Later, Aquinas, Scotus, and Cajetan took up the same topic, the history of their discussion proceeding roughly as follows. Like Avicenna, Aquinas claimed that natures in themselves are neither individual nor universal, that they possess neither unity nor plurality. This position left at least one question crucially unanswered; given that for scholastics unity and being are convertible, and that something is intelligible only to the degree that it is, for natures in themselves to be objects of our understanding, it seems that they must possess unity in some way.[2] To address concerns like this one, Scotus argued that while a nature in itself is neither individual nor universal, it nevertheless possesses in itself a measure of unity and being. As Ockham would soon point out, however, there are some grave metaphysical difficulties with Scotus’s position. Whether or not he was aware of these difficulties, when Cajetan revisited “horseness is just horseness,” although he agreed with Scotus that Aquinas had left certain questions unanswered, he also considered Scotus’s way of answering these questions unacceptable. His task was to answer the questions left open in Aquinas’s account while avoiding the problematic features of Scotus’s position. In this essay, I narrate the history of this discussion concerning common natures in greater detail and argue that Cajetan succeeds in both of his tasks.