Review of Tobias Hoffmann, Creatura intellecta: Die Ideen und Possibilien bei Duns Scotus mit Ausblick auf Franz von Mayronis, Poncius und Mastrius. Beiträge zur Geschichte der Philosophie und Theologie des Mittelalters. Neue Folge, Band 60. Münster: Aschendorff, 2002.

Forthcoming in Speculum

"Talk of ideas," as Hoffmann points out in his Introduction, "has been, since Plato, the answer to rather different questions, and in each approach the ideas have been assigned very different functions" (9). They can be invoked to explain intellectual cognition, to ground the ascription of natural-kind terms, to supply the content for divine thoughts, and to guarantee the rationality and intelligibility of the created world. For Scotus, "the only function of the ideas is to represent possible creatures" (16). Thus, Scotus's account of the divine ideas is closely bound up with his understanding of possibilia, and indeed of modality in general. Hoffmann develops these connections through careful textual analysis of the various passages in which Scotus discusses the divine ideas, illuminated by a consideration of the views that Scotus rejected and of the development of Scotus's thought by three later Scotists.

Hoffmann first discusses Scotus's account of divine knowledge in general and then turns to the specific question of how God knows creatures. He begins with Scotus's critique of three attempts to explain how God's knowledge of his own infinite, simple essence could ground distinct knowledge of the plurality of finite things other than God. Although the views differ in their details, all three make use of ideas as rational relations in order to explain God's knowledge of intelligibles other than his own essence. Scotus, however, insists that requiring rational relations is at best unnecessary and at worst contradictory. Perhaps the most telling objection -- which Scotus directs specifically against Henry of Ghent's view -- is that there is no knowledge of a relation without knowledge of the relata; it therefore makes no sense to say that God comes to know a creature by first knowing the relation of imitability between that creature and himself. Instead, "God knows creatures first without any relation on the part of God to creatures. He knows them as something absolute, not as something relative" (89). It is these absolute objects of knowledge, rather than any rational relations, that Scotus calls the divine ideas. Scotus argues that God produces the ideas, although since the ideas do not have real being, but only cognized being, he speaks of quasi-productio or productio diminuta and describes God's activity not as causal but as "principiative."

Thus the first three chapters set forth the main lines of Scotus's account of divine ideas. Chapter 4, which seems somewhat tangential to Hoffmann's main aims, examines the ways in which the divine ideas ground human understanding: not through illumination, as Henry of Ghent had argued, but in a variety of more indirect ways. The main thread of the exposition picks up again in the fifth chapter, which concerns possibilia. The connection between the divine ideas (creatures-as-cognized) and possibilia is clear: "They are in reality one and the same, since things are possible that have cognized-being in God, and conversely, God cognizes everything possible" (173). But in virtue of what are certain things possible and others not? Since Scotus has already rejected the notion that the intelligibility of creatures requires rational relations, it is no surprise to find that he also denies that the possibility of creatures depends on some relation (such as imitation of the divine essence). Creatures have their possibility in virtue of themselves (de se or ex se).

Here Hoffmann comes up against perhaps the most controverted issue in Scotus's discusson of modality. Scotus clearly and repeatedly makes both of the following claims, which seem to be, if not outright incompatible, at least in serious tension with each other:

(1) What is possible or not is so just because of its intrinsic character.

(2) Possibilia are produced in intelligible being by the divine intellect.

The problem is not dissolved by noting that (1) has to do with the formal cause of a creature's possibility and (2) with the efficient cause, since the divine intellect necessarily produces all and only those possibilia that it in fact produces -- in other words, it produces exactly those that are intrinsically formally possible. Thus, the working of the efficient cause seems to be circumscribed by the formal character of the possibilia that it has yet to produce: a puzzle, however one thinks of it. One solution is to let (1) drive one's intepretation of (2). On such a reading, the principiative activity of the divine intellect is, logically speaking, accidental to the realm of modality. This sort of reading seems to gain support from passages in which Scotus states that what is possible would be possible, and that (say) black and white would be incompatible, even if per impossibile God did not exist.

Hoffmann rejects such a reading and insists, in effect, that (2) should drive our interpretation of (1). According to him, "it is owing to the divine intellect that anything at all is ex se possible" (209). When Scotus says that something would be possible even if, per impossibile, God did not exist, that counterpossible supposition "should with greater fullness say, 'If God did not exist and nevertheless there were intelligible contents'. The impossible supposition of the nonexistence of God would then have to include the further impossible supposition that there are intelligible contents . . . without their having been produced by God" (212). Only if God produces intelligible contents are there possibilities and impossibilities, or terms that can be combined to make propositions that are possible or impossible. But those intelligible contents are possible in virtue of their intrinsic character and not because of some additional feature that God attaches to them.

In this discussion, as indeed throughout the book, Hoffmann is careful to engage both a wide range of Scotus's texts and the interpretive discussions in the secondary literature. He is much less attentive to the strictly philosophical issues that arise, and indeed he sometimes seems to suppose that philosophical difficulties can be solved by exegetical means. For example, the reading that makes God's principiative activity accidental to modality is driven not only by what Scotus says about the counterpossible scenarios but also by philosophical concerns: it not only makes better sense of (some of) the texts, it also makes better sense philosophically, to say that God as a matter of fact produces the possibilia but need not do so in order for what is possible to be possible. One way of putting the distinction is to say that for Scotus God is responsible for the esse possibile of creatures but not for their intrinsic possibility, their ratio possibilitatis. One of Hoffmann's arguments against this reading is that Scotus uses the terms esse possibile and ratio possibilitatis interchangeably in the Reportatio (206). But this is a non-sequitur. That Scotus did not use those terms to make the distinction does not mean that he did not make the distinction, at least implicitly -- or even that those terms would not have been the best ones in which to make the distinction explicitly.

The sticking-point for the reading Hoffmann rejects is Scotus's repeated claim that possible creatures are intelligible because God understands them, not the other way around. If possibility requires intelligibility, then it follows that there is no modality of any sort unless God thinks creatures into intelligible being. But it is not clear that Scotus thinks possibility requires intelligibility. And even if he does, it is not clear that there is any philosophically defensible reading of Scotus's claim about the intelligibility of creatures that is strong enough to block the reading Hoffmann opposes.

Whatever my reservations about the interpretation Hoffmann defends, there is no denying that he is a careful and intelligent exegete, and his presentation of Scotus's account of the divine ideas is well-structured, thorough, and gratifyingly attentive to a broad range of texts. His discussion of later Scotists such as John Ponce and Bartolomeo Mastri sheds light on the difficulties to be found in Scotus's work, as well as being interesting in its own right. For all these reasons, Creatura intellecta deserves to become required reading for anyone interested in scholastic theories of modality, divine knowledge, and the divine ideas.