Nicholas of Autrecourt, Buridan and Ockhamism

Nicholas of Autrecourt, Buridan and Ockhamism* T. K. SCOTT, JR. THE VIEW OF BURIDANas a popular but unoriginal distributor of Ockhamist doctrines has by now disappeared. Buridan's claim to be a philosopher in his own right is now secure, and Watsh has shown that in ethics, at least, there is a good deal to be gained from detailed attention to his differences from Ockham. x This paper will follow Walsh's lead with respect to the still widespread belief that Buridan did follow Ockham in his theory of knowledge. One of the reasons for that belief is the idea that Buridan defended Ockham against the skeptical attacks of Nicholas of Autrecourt. It is thought that Nicholas rejected a distinction that is central to Ockham's theory of knowledge, a distinction between the natural and the miraculous, i.e., between what occurs "in the common course of nature" and what is logically possible given God's omnipotence. Buridan is then supposed to have simultaneously attacked Nicholas and defended Ockham by insisting on this distinction. What follows is a re-examination of the question just how Ockham, Nicholas and Buridan are related in their views of knowledge. The interpretation sketched above will be rejected, and in its place, two opinions will be offered. The first is that neither Nicholas nor Buridan should be regarded as an Ockhamist in his theory of knowledge, if by that is meant that the final positions concerning the nature and criteria of knowledge a=d the processes of cognition are the same as Ockham's. But also it will be suggested that Nicholas' understanding of the nature and criteria of knowing is nearer Ockham's than is Buridan's, so that in this sense, Nicholas is more properly regarded as "Ockhamistic" than is Buridan. To expedite the discussion, attcntion will be directed initially to what may be called simple "perceptual" knowledge, i.e., to those cases in which it is claimed that something exists or that something is the subject of some accident and in * ] want to thank the National Endowment for the Humanities for a l~ellowship which made available the time to carry out this study. James J. Walsh, "Nominalism and the Ethics: Some Remarks about Buridan's Commentary ," Journal oJ the History o] Philosophy, IV (1966), 1-13. [15] 16 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY which the claim is made while and because a sensory awareness occurs. 2 There will be no discussion of truths known ex vi terminorum. And more importantly, there will be no discussion of those cases in which the knowledge claim is a causal generalization nor even of those in which it is claimed that some particular is the cause of some other, although some of these latter might be considered special cases of simple "perceptual" claims. The critique of such claims is, of course, a central part of Nicholas' thought, and it is developed on the same principles as his general critique of empirical knowledge. But in trying to relate his discussions to Buridan's and Ockham's, complications arise that make the matter unwieldy, so that it has seemed best to treat it separately in a section at the end of the paper. I. Ockham In a recent study, I discussed Ockham's conception of knowledge as based on evident judgments caused by a special sort of psychic event known as intuitive cognition. 3 And among other things, it was argued that Ock,ham can provide no way of distinguishing intuitive cognitions from others and so no way of determining which judgments are evident, so that even if knowledge (in his sense) is possible, we can never know that we know or even have any justification for claiming to know. But whatever the logic of Ockham's position may be, it is also clear that he does not regard himself as trapped at any such impasse. And given his theory of knowledge as it stands, the most likely explanation of that is that he is tacitly presupposing either that intuitive cognitions are introspectively identifiable without reference to evidence or that evident judgments are thus identifiable without reference to intuitive cognitions. 4 A number of authors have suggested that Ockham...