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chapter 6 Final conclusions In the introduction, I claimed that it is better to say that scientia de anima transformed than to say that it changed. In this concluding chapter I want to bring together what I think were some of the most important transformations in the period c. 1260–c. 1360. In doing so, I will also take up the question of the relation between the methodological and the doctrinal parts of the commentaries. Radulphus Brito and William Ockham In the fourteenth century, two philosophers in particular influenced the De anima tradition in ways that have not been noted before, namely Radulphus Brito and William Ockham. Brito made several important contributions. He was the first to discuss the topic of the numerical identity of accidents through generation and corruption in detail, in which he was followed by all later commentators. But he was also the first to structure the discussion about the manner in which the soul inheres in the body by first discussing the souls of annulose animals, then those of perfect animals, and finally those of human beings. This method of beginning with the annulose animals and then moving to more complex animals became the standard manner in which the later commentators discuss the structure of the soul and its relation to the body. Unfortunately Brito was unclear about the criteria by means of which we can move from one level of complexity to the next. This became apparent in his discussion of the question whether the soul is extended throughout the body. Whereas Aquinas formulated one criterion that could be applied to all souls, namely that the soul is extended if and only if the living being can be divided in such a way that both parts continue to exercise all vital operations, Brito formulated two different criteria. The first is that souls that are not educed from the potency of matter are not extended throughout the body. The second is that in those cases where both parts of a divided living being continue to exercise all vital operations, their soul is extended. This led to difficulties in describing how the souls of perfect animals inhere in the body. The mid-fourteenth-century commentators who took over Brito’s approach to discussing the inherence of the soul disagreed about the criteria by which to move from the souls of the annulose animals to those of perfect animals. Because of their (implicit) disagreement about these criteria, they reached opposite conclusions about the innermost structure of the souls of perfect animals. Whereas 302 Final conclusions these are heterogeneous according Oresme and Anonymus Patar, these are homogeneous according to Buridan and Marsilius. William Ockham is the second philosopher who greatly influenced the De anima tradition, in spite of the fact that he never wrote his own commentary on Aristotle’s treatise. The commentators on De anima from Aquinas to Jandun were practically unanimous in their description of the relation between the soul and its powers. The same applies to their description of the presence of the vegetative and sensitive souls in the body. All of them claimed, following Albert the Great, that the soul is really distinct from its powers, and that the relation between the powers and the soul should be described in terms of a flowing forth (fluxus). And even in the tradition of commentaries on Peter Lombard’s Sententiae, theologians argued for some form of distinction between the soul and its powers, whether it was intentional or formal or something else. Ockham, by contrast, identified the soul with its powers. In doing so, he introduced a distinction between two senses of the term ‘power’, one of which applies to the soul itself and the other to the dispositions of the body. The soul is identical with its powers in the first sense, whereas in the second sense the powers are distinct from the soul. The distinction enabled him to discuss the question whether the soul is present everywhere in the body according to all its powers by means of the thought experiment of the eye in the foot. In all of this, he is followed by Buridan, Oresme, Anonymus Patar, and Marsilius of Inghen. Even Pierre d’Ailly places himself in this tradition by including this new solution in his brief discussion of the soul’s structure. There remained, however, two topics on which these philosophers could not agree even with the new distinction between senses of ‘power’ and the thought experiment in hand. The first...

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