Per Caritatem

Guest Lecturer

Alain de Libera  (Lecture title:  “When did the ‘Modern Subject’ Emerge?”)
Full Professor at the University of Geneva, Switzerland
Senior Fellow at the École pratique des hautes études
Department of Religious Studies, Paris, France

Response by Philipp Rosemann, University of Dallas

Dates/Times/Events

Aquinas Lecture:

Monday, January 28, 2008
7:30 p.m. Lynch Auditorium
Reception to follow
Gorman Faculty Lounge

Student Discussion:

Tuesday, January 29, 5:00 p.m., Braniff 201

Public Seminars:

Wednesday 1/30, Thursday 1/31, Friday 2/1, from 4:30 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
Gorman Faculty Lounge, (Thursday 1/31 in Gorman B)

For more information, please phone the Philosophy Department at 972.721.5161.

Lecture Abstract:  “When did the ‘Modern Subject’ Emerge?”

The idea of the modern subject-that is, the concept of some “thing” that is both the owner of certain mental states and the agent of certain activities-is generally traced back to Descartes. Heidegger considered him to be the one who completed the transformation of the Aristotelian hypokeimenon into “the subjectum which man is” by loading its “actuality” with the new dimension of perceptive activity. From an “archeological” point of view, however, the alleged concept of a “Cartesian subject” should be considered as a medieval theological construct, developed over time in relation to different sets of problems, and connected with a definite set of principles and rules, constituting the “field of presence” (Foucault) of subjectivity from the Middle Ages onwards. Among these problems, the Incarnation, the Resurrection, and the question of Christ’s unity of will play a prominent, though often neglected, role. The lecture will first focus on the story of one of the principles used to address the question of the two wills in the incarnate Christ: actiones sunt suppositorum, “actions belong to subjects.” Starting with Nietzsche’s criticism of the “superstition of logicians” (i.e., the belief that “the subject I is the condition of the predicate think“) and Peter Strawson’s famous question in Individuals (“Why are one’s states of consciousness ascribed to anything at all?”), I will consider Thomas Aquinas’s and Peter Olivi’s understanding of actiones sunt suppositorum, trace it to its original Aristotelian formulation, and analyze the views of the two theologians on the “subject” with respect to the conflicting models of mind (nous, mens) that they inherited from ancient philosophy and theology: the Aristotelian and the Augustinian (or perichoretic) one. I will then endeavor, on this background, to analyze historically “attributivism,” which has for a long time been the prevailing model of subjectivity and personhood in modern philosophy. This should allow me to “deconstruct” partially the historiographical myth of the “Cartesian subject,” and to reappraise the Lockean and Leibnizian contributions to the history of the Self.

I recently finished a book by Philipp W. Rosemann, entitled, Understanding Scholastic Thought with Foucault, and would highly recommend it to anyone with both medieval and postmodern sensibilities. Among the many topics and theses that Rosemann engages, the following were particularly interesting: (1) the presentation of a paradigm in which we understand the Western philosophical tradition in terms of the broad structure of a mythos/logos dialectic and scholastic thought with its sophia/moria dialectic reflects a moment within that larger context, (2) a discussion of the text-centeredness of the Scholastic culture and the conviction that though both the text of the world and the text of Scripture are to be read in light of their God given intelligibility, they are not exhaustible; hence, the “openness” of Scholastic thought which leads to more and more commentaries which together help us to gain more insight on the whole, yet never with the view to comprehension (3) an explanation of how St. Thomas convincingly brings together Greek circularity and Christian linearity, (4) a Foucaultian take on the need to understand an episteme’s “outside” in order to understand the episteme, (5) the “witch-hunt” as an example of the way in which the Scholastic episteme “closed the circle” and became irrationality, (6) a discussion of the “openness” of the quaestio vs. the new literary forms of e.g., Suarez, (7) an alternative take on Descartes [following Marion] and Luther both in respect to negative theology and the desire to safeguard God’s transcendence.

The book is exceedingly well-written, the ideas are presented with clarity and appeal, and Rosemann provides a helpful appendix entitled, “The Library of the Medievalist Philosopher.”

In his fascinating book, Understanding Scholastic Thought With Foucault, Philipp W. Rosemann illustrates how even the “letter,” i.e. the textual base in medieval studies, is affected by paradigm changes. As Rosemann explains, the German philologist, Karl Lachmann, pioneered an editorial method that has by and large determined the form of ancient and medieval texts as found in contemporary editions. The goal of the Lachmannian method is to “eliminate all the mistakes that are inevitable in the transmission of handwritten texts as copies, and so on. What the Lachmannians are trying to do is establish families of shared mistakes in the manuscript tradition and thus, by identifying the genealogical order in this tradition of copies, return to the source” (p. 11). As Rosemann observes, the presuppositions behind this approach is that “what counts in the history of a text is just the original in its pure identity; the differentiation this textual identity necessarily undergoes is an history of errors that should be overcome” (p. 11). Interestingly, due to both practical and theoretical reasons, contemporary editors have altered the Lachmannian method. On the practical side, the difficulties in trying to establish precise family groups of textual errors is virtually impossible, as the family types tend to negatively influence and corrupt one another. Theoretically speaking, “the Lachmannian method is founded upon a quest for lost origins, a quest that contemporary philosophy would denounce as being vain and imaginary. Why attempt to surmount the historical multiplicity of different readings of an original text, different readings that, after all, testify to the historical life of the original? What are the advantages of re-establishing the flawless identity of a text that, in its authentic form, may have remained totally insignificant?” (pp. 11-12). In contrast, contemporary editorial practices allow the diversity of texts to speak by producing editions that present us (in so far as it is possible) with the original text and the text’s historical development. That is, “they attempt at once to reconstruct the original identity of the text, and to preserve the difference of its historical expressions” (p. 12). Thus, in contrast with the goal of the Lachmannian approach, which tries to get back to the “pure: and “untainted” original, contemporary editorial practices view the diversity of the texts in a positive light, which supports Rosemann’s thesis that paradigm shifts affect even the “letter.”