Robert Kilwardby on the Human Soul: Plurality of Forms and Censorship in the Thirteenth Century by José Filipe Silva (review)

Until very recently, Robert Kilwardby was known mostly as the Dominican archbishop who in 1277 condemned Aquinas’s position on the unicity of substantial form in Oxford. Although his (early) logical writings have received ample attention in the past few decades, this, arguably, had little impact on the overall perception of Kilwardby. Silva’s monograph aims to revise this picture by giving a detailed account of Kilwardby’s views on the human soul and cognition, aspects of his thought that have so far received little attention. It should be mentioned that this important project of fleshing out Kilwardby’s own philosophical views has been continued by the recently published Companion to the Philosophy of Robert Kilwardby (Brill, 2013), edited by Henrik Lagerlund and Paul Thom, to which Silva also contributed.

The book is divided into three parts. The first deals with Kilwardby’s views on the ontological structure of human beings; the second deals with his theory of knowledge; and the third and smallest part relates the findings from part 1 to the Oxford prohibitions. In the first part, Silva gives a detailed and nuanced account of Kilwardby’s views, showing the different layers of ontological complexity Kilwardby introduces in human beings, both on the level of the soul and on the level of the body. The analysis more than adequately supports one of Silva’s main theses, namely that “Kilwardby was not an anti-Aristotelian, but an Augustinian who was also an Aristotelian” (18), although he sides with Augustine whenever there are irreconcilable differences.

Part 2 addresses the processes involved in cognition, and is divided into two subparts: on sense perception and on intellectual cognition. The part on sense cognition presents further evidence of Kilwardby’s attempt at providing an account of the human soul and its functions that is compatible with both Aristotle and Augustine, and Silva’s account is again thorough and convincing. The part on intellectual cognition, by contrast, deals with such a great variety of topics that it tends to lose some focus at times, and the end result is more of a broad overview than an in-depth study of the topic. Among the many topics addressed are angelic cognition, language, theories of illumination, Kilwardby’s conception of scientific knowledge and truth, and the Trinitarian model for the soul.

Throughout the book, Silva mentions his desire to understand Kilwardby’s motivations for issuing his prohibitions as the primary motivation to study his views on the soul and cognition. Perhaps this is why the prohibitions feature so prominently in the book’s title. Nevertheless, the third part is best viewed as an appendix to the detailed discussion of Kilwardby’s views of the structure of human beings undertaken in part 1. Partly because of the high quality of the analysis in the first two parts, it is also somewhat disappointing. On the positive side, Silva succeeds at (re) establishing that it is highly unlikely that Kilwardby’s prohibitions were directed mainly or even primarily at Thomas Aquinas. Rather, it seems he wanted to reject any theory that failed to provide the required ontological complexity within the human soul, without necessarily having one particular variant in mind. On the negative side, a full analysis of all sixteen prohibited propositions in naturalibus is curiously absent; in fact, not even all are listed. One would at least expect a more detailed discussion of proposition 16 in this context: “that the intellective soul is united to prime matter in such a way that it corrupts all that preceded all the way down to prime matter,” since the link with Aquinas’s views is (and has been) so easily made. Moreover, Silva seems to follow a still-common misrepresentation of the council of Vienne (1311–12) when he writes that it “would elect the Thomist unicity thesis as the official...