SECTION A
1. Identify each of the passages (i) and (ii), explain the part it plays in the
argument of the text from which it is taken and supply whatever
background material and interpretative comments a reader now would
need in order to understand its full significance. You may also compare
the two passages.
Passages (i) and (ii) – at end of paper.
2. Identify each of the passages (iii) and (iv), explain the part it plays in the
argument of the text from which it is taken and supply whatever
background material and interpretative comments a reader now would
need in order to understand its full significance. You may also compare
the two passages.
Passages (iii) and (iv) – at end of paper.
SECTION B
3. EITHER: (a) Does Avicenna justify the role he gives to the Agent Intellect
in his theory of cognition?
OR: (b) What does Avicenna want to show by his Flying Man example?
Does he succeed?
4. In what ways is Averroes’s theory of intellectual knowledge faithful to
Aristotle, and in what ways not?
5. EITHER: (a) ‘For Aquinas intelligible species are representations of things
in the external world.’ Discuss.
OR: (b) ‘According to Aquinas, our self-knowledge is always indirect.’
Discuss.
6. What are Olivi’s central objections to the Aristotelian view of intellectual
knowledge?
7. Given that Pomponazzi admits that the human intellect is immaterial, what
are his grounds for arguing that it is mortal?
8. ‘What relationship can possibly be understood to exist between corporeal
and incorporeal parts?’ (GASSENDI). Discuss whether Descartes can
answer this criticism of his theory about mind and body.
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9. ‘Everything that is cognized is cognized not according to its own power,
but rather according to the capacity of the cognizers.’ (BOETHIUS). To
what extent is Boethius able to use this principle to show that divine
prescience is compatible with the contingency of future events?
10. Can Abelard coherently hold that, although God cannot do other than he
does, a sinner who has in fact been damned might have repented and
been saved by Him?
11. ‘Al-Ghazali’s view of causality is, despite appearances, too close to
Averroes’s own for Averroes’s criticisms to be effective.’ Discuss.
12. Does Ockham’s critique of Scotus’s theory of God’s contingent causation
simply beg the question?
13. To what extent, according to Gersonides, does God exercise particular
providence? How well does he justify his position?
14. ‘Things could have been produced by God in no other way, and in no
other order than they have been produced.’ (SPINOZA). Discuss.
PASSAGES
Question 1
(i) We state that the theoretical faculty in humans also emerges from
potentiality to actuality by the illumination of a substance that has such an
effect upon it. That is because nothing can emerge from potentiality into
actuality without something that endows it with actuality; it cannot do so by
itself. The actuality with which the theoretical faculty is endowed is the
form of the intelligibles. Hence, there is something that endows the soul
with the form of the intelligibles, and imprints them upon it from its own
substance. Thus, this entity must have the form of the intelligibles
essentially, and it is therefore essentially an intellect. If it were merely a
potential intellect there would be an impossible infinite regress, or else the
regress would be blocked by something that is an intellect in substance,
and is what causes everything that is a potential intellect to become an
actual intellect. This cause will be sufficient on its own to render potential
intellects into actual intellects. This is what is called the “Active Intellect,”
in comparison with the potential intellects that emerge into actuality, just
as the material intellect is called the “passive intellect” in relation to it, and
the faculty of representation is called another “passive intellect” in relation
to it. The intellect that exists between the Active Intellect and the passive
intellect is called the “acquired intellect.
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(ii) A thing is intelligible according as it is in act. Now the ultimate perfection
of the intellect consists in its own operation: for this is not an act tending
to something else in which lies the perfection of the work accomplished,
as building is the perfection of the thing built; but it remains in the agent
as its perfection and act … Therefore the first thing understood of the
intellect is its own act of understanding. This occurs in different ways with
different intellects. For there is an intellect, namely, the Divine, which is Its
own act of intelligence, so that in God the understanding of His
intelligence, and the understanding of His Essence, are one and the
same act, because His Essence is His act of understanding. But there is
another intellect, the angelic, which is not its own act of understanding, as
we have said above, and yet the first object of that act is the angelic
essence. Wherefore although there is a logical distinction between the act
whereby he understands that he understands, and that whereby he
understands his essence, yet he understands both by one and the same
act; because to understand his own essence is the proper perfection of
his essence, and by one and the same act is a thing, together with its
perfection, understood. And there is yet another, namely, the human
intellect, which neither is its own act of understanding, nor is its own
essence the first object of its act of understanding, for this object is the
nature of a material thing. And therefore that which is first known by the
human intellect is an object of this kind, and that which is known
secondarily is the act by which that object is known; and through the act
the intellect itself is known, the perfection of which is this act of
understanding. For this reason did the Philosopher assert that objects are
known before acts, and acts before powers.
Question 2
(iii) But, you will say, if it has been placed within my power to change my
intention, then I shall gut Providence, since, perhaps, I shall have
changed the things that is has foreknowledge of. I shall answer that yes,
you can alter the course of your intention; however, since the present
truth of Providence observes that you can do so and whether you will do
so and to what end you will redirect it, you cannot avoid divine
foreknowledge, just as you cannot escape the gaze of its present eye
even though you redirect yourself by your free will toward actions of
different sorts. Well then! you will say; will divine knowledge be changed
by my arrangements, with the result that, when I wish for now this thing,
now that, divine knowledge seems to switch back and forth the
vicissitudes of its foreknowing? Hardly. For the divine gaze runs on
ahead of every thing that will come to pass and twists it back and calls it
back to the present of its own proper preception; it does not, as you
reckon it, switch back and forth in an alternation of a foreknowledge of
now this thing, now another; rather, remaining stable, it anticipates and
embraces your changes in its single stroke.
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(iv) The first is that our opponent claims that the agent of the burning is the
fire exclusively; this is a natural, not a voluntary agent, and cannot abstain
from what is in its nature when it is brought into contact with a receptive
substratum. This we deny, saying: The agent of the burning is God,
through His creating the black in the cotton and the disconnexion of its
parts, and it is God who made the cotton burn and made it ashes either
through the intermediation of angels or without intermediation. For fire is
a dead body which has no action, and what is the proof that it is the
agent? Indeed, the philosophers have no other proof than the
observation of the occurence of the burning, when there is contact with
fire, but observation proves only a simultaneity, not a causation, and, in
reality, there is no other cause but God. For there is unanimity of opinion
about the fact that the union of the spirit with the perceptive and moving
faculties in the sperm of animals does not originate in the natures
contained in warmth, cold, moistness, and dryness, and that the father is
neither the agent of the embryo through introducing sperm into the uterus,
nor the agent of its life, its sight and hearing, and all its other faculties.
And although it is well known that the same faculties exist in the father,
still nobody thinks that these faculties exist through him; no, their
existence is produced by the First either directly or through the
intermediation of the angels who are in charge of these events. Of this
fact the philosophers who believe in a creator are quite convinced, but it
is precisely with them that we are in dispute.