Nicholas of Autrecourt (11/5)

Katie, Robb, Dave, Shawn, Jamie

"Definition of Skepticism"

Philosophical skepticism (from Greek σκέψις - skepsis meaning "enquiry" - UK spelling, scepticism) is both a philosophical school of thought and a method that crosses disciplines and cultures. Many skeptics critically examine the meaning systems of their times, and this examination often results in a position of ambiguity or doubt.^[1] This skepticism can range from disbelief in contemporary philosophical solutions, toagnosticism, to rejecting the reality of the external world. One kind of scientific skepticism refers to the critical analysis of claims lacking empirical evidence. We are all skeptical of some things, especially since doubt and opposition are not always clearly distinguished. Philosophical skepticism, however, is an old movement with many variations, and contrasts with the view that at least one thing is certain, but if by being certain we mean absolute or unconditional certainty, then it is doubtful if it is rational to claim to be certain about anything. Indeed, for Hellenistic philosophers claiming that at least one thing is certain makes one a dogmatist.

Philosophical skepticism is distinguished from methodological skepticism in that philosophical skepticism is an approach that denies the possibility of certainty in knowledge, whereas methodological skepticism is an approach that subjects all knowledge claims to scrutiny with the goal of sorting out true from false claims.

Who is he:

Nicholas Of Autrecourt, French Nicolas D’autrecourt    (born c. 1300, Autrecourt, near Verdun, Fr.—died after 1350, Metz, Lorrain), French philosopher and theologian known principally for developing medieval Skepticism to its extreme logical conclusions, which were condemned as heretical.

Nicholas was an advanced student in liberal arts and philosophy at the Sorbonne faculty of the University of Paris from 1320 to 1327. He became one of the most notable adherents of nominalism, a school of thought holding that only individual objects are real and that universal concepts simply express things as names. Nicholas’ chief writings are commentaries on the 12th-century Sentences of Peter Lombard, the basic medieval compendium of philosophicaltheology, and on the Politics of Aristotle; nine letters to the Franciscan monk-philosopher Bernard of Arezzo; and an important treatise usually designated by the opening words Exigit ordo executionis (“The order of completion requires”). This last contains the 60 theses controverted at Nicholas’ heresy trial, convened by Pope Benedict XII at Avignon, in 1340.

Nicholas rejected the traditional Aristotelian objectivism, with its allusions to a single intellect for all men, and proposed that there are only two bases for intellectual certitude: the logical principle of identity, with its correlative principle of contradiction, which states that a thing cannot simultaneously be itself and another; and the immediate evidence of sense data. Consistent with his nominalist doctrine, he denied that any causal relation could be known experientially and taught that the very principle of causality could be reduced to the empirical declaration of the succession of two facts. The consequence of such a concept of causality, he averred, was to reject the possibility of any rational proof for the existence of God and to deny any divine cause in creation. Indeed, he held as more probable that the world had existed from eternity.

The point of departure for Autrecourt's physics is a thesis which strikes him as more probable than its opposite, namely that all things are eternal. Autrecourt assures the reader that he is speaking as a natural philosopher, and that he is not contradicting Catholic faith. One of the implications of his thesis is that there is no generation or corruption in the universe. Autrecourt refutes Averroes's (and Aristotle's) doctrine of prime matter in which substantial forms are generated and corrupted. He replaces the theory of hylemorphism, which attributes the coming-to-be and passing-away of properties and of objects to forms that begin and cease to exist in matter, by atomism. Change in the natural world is caused by the movement of atoms. These atoms are to be understood as infinitely small parcels of matter which have properties.

As Autrecourt explicitly indicates, his discussion of the eternity of things is linked to his views on motion and on atomism. For this reason, he places the section on the divisibility of matter in between his treatment of eternity and of motion, “because some of the points to be raised about indivisibles will prepare us for the question of movement”. What Autrecourt means is that a number of arguments about the divisibility of space and time involve moving objects.

Autrecourt opens his discussion of atoms or indivisibles by restating Aristotle's position that no continuum is composed of indivisibles. He presents five arguments in support of this thesis, and places beside them his own counterarguments, which are meant to prove “with sufficient probability” the opposite conclusion. The section makes clear that Autrecourt is familiar with the contemporary debates at Paris about the divisibility of the continuum. It is not possible, however, to identify his opponents, and at times his discussion lacks coherence. In keeping with this atomistic view, he also holds that space and time consist of indivisible units, viz., points and instants, respectively.

The discussion of motion, which focuses on its ontological status, is placed in the larger context of a discussion of quantity. The reason is, that motion is one particular type of quantity, namely successive quantity (as distinct from permanent quantity). Autrecourt argues that material substance and its quantity are not distinct. The same holds true for other characteristic properties of a substance, the sensible qualities: they are not distinct from their substance. Autrecourt claims, for instance, that fire and its heat and water and its coldness are not distinct. At the background of this section is the late-medieval debate about the basic ontological categories, induced by Aristotle's Categories and Metaphysics. Given these preliminaries, it comes as no surprise that Autrecourt also defends the thesis that motion is not distinct from the mobile object.

Autrecourt argues that motion is not a thing distinct from the moving object. Following Ockham, he rejects the idea that motion is a positive thing inhering in the mobile object. Thus, the loss of motion should not be described as the destruction or corruption of an entity, and the eternity doctrine is saved.