John E. Murdoch, “The Analytic Character of Late Medieval Learning: Natural Philosophy without Nature,” in Approaches to Nature in the Middle Ages, ed. Lawrence D. Roberts (Binghampton, NY: Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, 1982).
Response
In “The Analytic Character of Late Medieval Learning: Natural Philosophy without Nature” John Murdoch, like Ernest Moody in his “Empiricism and Metaphysics in Medieval Philosophy,” sought to counteract the prevailing historiographic attitude toward the fourteenth century: that it was, relative to the thirteenth century, a period of skepticism, destruction, and decline. While Murdoch supports Moody’s claim that, against the backdrop of the speculative philosophy of the thirteenth century, the fourteenth was analytic, he takes issue with Moody’s reductive simplification of this transition. For Moody, the prevailing historiographic attitude to the fourteenth century was due to the superior theological attention paid in the thirteenth century; so for Moody, by this standard of quality, the fourteenth century was seen in decline because it “withdrew itself from the kind of questions which are of interest to theology and thereby ceased to be of value as a medium of expression for theology.” Murdoch disputes this with the, what seems obvious and undeniable now, claim that theology and philosophy were as mutually co-constitutive as ever in the fourteenth century. Murdoch also chafes at the emphasis Moody places on the role of empiricism in fourteenth century philosophy. Though Murdoch does not stoop to this accusation (I have no such scruples), it appears that Moody was motivated by a Whiggish concern to reframe fourteenth century philosophy, with its attendant shift from theological to empirical concerns, as the herald and harbinger of the scientific revolution and enlightenment. Murdoch tempers this flame:
True, empiricist epistemology was dominant in the fourteenth century. But this did not mean that natural philosophy then proceeded by a dramatic increase in attention being paid to experience and observation (let alone anything like experiment) or was suddenly overwrought with concern about testing or matching its result with nature; in a very important way natural philosophy was not about nature.
And now we are getting to the crux of the matter for Murdoch. Rather than being about nature, fourteenth-century philosophical investigations were secundum imaginationem. That is, the extension of the application of logic and logico-mathematical techniques in both generating and resolving problems.
Thus Murdoch’s years investing medieval languages of analysis: proportiones, intension and remission, first and last instants, beginning and ceasing, the theory of supposition. Murdoch deals with all of this in other papers. In the present text he is concerned with “the metalinguistic treatment of problems; the application of the doctrine of supposition; and the impact of the tradition of solving sophisms.”
Notes
- 171 – “Compared to the thirteenth century, it [14th C.] was held to be a period of skepticism, destruction, and decline.”
- 171-2 – “. . . the basic attitude of the Church and its theologians in the thirteenth century toward philosophy was anti-metaphysical and that ‘for this reason, the actual development of scholasticism toward an empiricist conception of philosophy was a fulfillment, rather than a failure, of the scholastic enterprise.’ Secondly, this ‘fulfillment’ came to pass through an ‘internal criticism’ during the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries of the ‘metaphysical claims of the Greek and Arab philosophies which had been introduced from the East.’”
- 172 – [quoting Moody] – “. . . this epistemological and logical criticism of metaphysics . . . transformed the whole character of philosophy from its Greek form — primarily cosmological and speculative — to forms which became characteristic of the philosophies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries — essentially critical. This transformation of the form of philosophical inquiry, from the speculative to the analytic, seems to me to be the most significant fact, for the history of philosophy, in the scholastic period. For better or for worse, it gave a new character and direction to all later philosophy, of which we have not yet seen the end.”
- “If it is true that fourteenth-century philosophy was analytic when viewed against the more speculative background provided by thirteenth-century philosophy, just how was it analytic? What characteristics made it so and just how were these characteristics exhibited in detail in fourteenth-century learning, in theology and science (if it is proper to distinguish such a discipline in this period) as well as in philosophy?”
- 173 – “For it seems to me that fourteenth-century philosophy did not withdraw itself from theology and from the questions of interest to it. Fourteenth-century philosophical developments were, I think, of considerable use to fourteenth-century theology. If anything it was perhaps more of a ‘two-way street’ between these two disciplines in the fourteenth century than it was in the thirteenth.”
- 174-5 – “But the irony of the fact is that by far the major share of the fourteenth-century developments in science of which Moody here speaks were not accomplishments due to a rising empiricism. True, empiricist epistemology was dominant in the fourteenth century. But this did not mean that natural philosophy the proceeded by a dramatic increase in attention being paid to experience and observation (let alone anything like experiment) or was suddenly overwrought with concern about testing or matching its results with nature; in a very important way natural philosophy was not about nature. On the contrary, its procedures were increasingly secundum imaginationem (to use an extremely frequently occurring phrase) and when some ‘natural confirmation’ of a result is brought forth, more often than not it too was an ‘imaginative construct.’ To be even more specific, what one finds as a dominant feature of fourteenth-century natural philosophy — especially at Oxford . . . is the extension of the applicatio nof logic and logico-mathematical techniques in not just resolving, but even in creating and then resolving, problems in natural philosophy.”
