Medieval Philosophy

by Peter S. Adamson

sort of connection to the body, but it is unified to the lower soul because the two souls share the same spiritual matter. Thus, even though the rational soul has no direct relationship to (never mind dependence on) the body, it forms a unity with the body indirectly or “transitively.” It is unified to the lower soul and the lower soul is in turn unified to the body.6 All of this is, I think, profoundly un-Aristotelian, which, of course, would bother Olivi not one little bit. In Aristotle’s writings on the soul we are told that it is the human person who performs the various psychological functions through the soul. Your soul is not a separate thing in its own right, never mind a separate thing whose most important part is only indirectly related to your body. By contrast, Olivi insists that the soul itself is the subject of our most important psychological activities. This is evident from his treatment of free will. Here we’re again anticipating a central dispute in later medieval philosophy, which is usually framed as a clash between two ways of explaining free actions, called by modern scholars “intellectualism” and “voluntarism.” As we saw, the basic idea of the intellectualist position is that human choice is prompted by some belief or understanding of the best thing to do. The voluntarist, by contrast, wants to say that a free choice consists in a sheer act of the will. Our choices may somehow be influenced by our beliefs but ultimately the explanatory buck stops wit...