Peter Aureol [addendum]
Peter Aureol (Petrus Aureolus, Petrus Aureoli, Peter Auriol, Peter Oriole), French Franciscan philosopher and theologian called "Doctor Facundus," was born near Gourdon, Lot. He entered the Franciscan order before 1300 and was assigned to the province of Aquitaine. In 1304, Aureol was at Paris, but whether he studied under John Duns Scotus there is uncertain. His first work was Tractatus de Paupertate (1311). In 1312 he was lector at the studium generale at Bologna where he composed his only purely philosophical work, the unfinished Tractatus de Principiis Naturae. From 1314 to 1316, as lector at Toulouse, he wrote the original and influential tract De Conceptione B. M. V. and the Repercussorium against certain opponents of the tract. Probably in his Bologna and Toulouse period, Aureol was composing his extensive Scriptum super Primum Sententiarum; the work was substantially completed by late 1316 and dedicated to Pope John XXII. At the Chapter General of Naples in 1316, Aureol was nominated to lecture on the Sentences at Paris. The newly elected general of the order, Michael of Cesena, who had just finished his own Sentences at Paris, gave his consent as required, even though Aureol had openly opposed him.
Aureol lectured at Paris from 1316 to 1318; several extant commentaries on books I–IV of the Sentences are probably related to the lectures held in this period, but the relationship between the various versions is still not entirely clear [see, though, Nielsen (2002) and Schabel (2000)]. In a letter dated July 14, 1318, John XXII asked the chancellor of Paris to grant Aureol the licentiate. Aureol is later mentioned (November 13, 1318) as among the regent masters. For the next two years, he taught Scripture at Paris while composing his often-published Compendium Sensus Litteralis Totius Scripturae (1319) and holding at least one Quodlibetal disputation (1320). At the end of 1320, Aureol became provincial of Aquitaine but was nominated archbishop of Aix-en-Provence and was consecrated by the pope himself in 1321. He died either at Avignon or Aix.
Aureol is a perceptive critic of the views of earlier thinkers, frequently using the thought of Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Duns Scotus, to name but a few, as a springboard for arriving at his own opinion on the matter at hand. Aureol's views are often innovative, and some of them provoked heated reaction from contemporaries such as Hervaeus Natalis and Thomas Wylton, as well as important later thinkers such as William of Ockham, Gregory of Rimini, and John Capreolus. Aureol's thought influenced the scholastic discussion into the seventeenth century.
Aureol holds that there is no principle of individuation since only individuals exist in extramental reality. This is the foundation of Aureol's conceptualism inasmuch as it entails that all universality is a product of mental activity. Thus, Aureol rejects both the strict realism of Plato and the more moderate realism of the thirteenth century. Nevertheless, Aureol insists that our universal concepts have direct foundations in the really existing individuals in the world. All individuals have certain essential features; these features are proper to the individual (they are in no way universal), yet essential features in individuals of the same natural kind (e.g., rationality in each human being) are so similar that they cause any intellect to form the same universal concept. Which universal concept an individual someone actually forms (e.g., genus or species) depends on how closely that person wills to focus the intellect on the object of cognition. Concepts for Aureol are the products of intellectual acts, and, in one of his most idiosyncratic views, he argues that this product is numerically identical with the object of cognition, merely in another mode of being which Aureol calls apparent or intentional being (the being the object has in virtue of its being perceived). Aureol argues along similar lines for sense perception, and behind these views is his belief in the fundamental activity of cognitive powers: They place the object of cognition in another mode of being.
Aureol wants to ensure that his philosophical and theological explanations do not jeopardize human free will, and this comes to light in his ideas on predestination and particularly on future contingents and divine foreknowledge. In the latter areas, Aureol holds that future-tensed propositions can be neither determinately true nor determinately false but have to be neutral with regard to truth–value because otherwise everything would be determined and there would be no free will. Moreover, since for Aureol immutability is equivalent to necessity, if God knows in a determinate fashion future events as future, this knowledge will be subject to God's immutability, and hence it, and the events it describes, would be necessary. Thus, Aureol claims that God understands the future, not as future, but indistantly and as abstracted from all time. Aureol's view was revived at the University of Leuven in the fifteenth century and created a European-wide debate of such gravity that in 1474 the pope condemned aspects of the view.
In his epistemology, Aureol stresses the psychological experience of perception. Thus, in his interpretation of the important later-medieval distinction between intuitive and abstractive cognition, the difference between these two ways in which cognitive faculties form representations is phenomenological: Intuitive cognition appears as clear and immediate (like sight) while abstractive cognition appears discursive and mediate (like imagination). This same emphasis on psychology is found in Aureol's ideas on the foundation of knowledge, propositions known through themselves (propositiones per se notae): For Aureol, these propositions are characterized by being known suddenly (i.e., imperceptibly quickly) and without the aid of a teacher.
In metaphysics, Aureol adopts Duns Scotus's view that the concept of being is univocal between God and creatures and between substance and accident, but he modifies it to avoid some of the problems he sees with Duns Scotus's ideas. For Aureol, the concept of being is a totally indeterminate concept having no explicit content of its own; any intellectual acquaintance, no matter how weak, can be the basis for the formation of the concept of being. This position in turn had consequences for Aureol's view of metaphysics as a science since he holds that the subject of metaphysics is being as such. Aureol's pronounced voluntarism is in line with the Franciscan tradition, as is his view that theology is a practical (as opposed to a speculative) science, but his description of theology as declarative (as opposed to deductive or scientific) is quite unusual. Aureol also has distinctive views on the categories (especially on relations), on the ontology of accidents, and on infinity.
Capreolus, John; Duns Scotus, John; Epistemology; Gregory of Rimini; Henry of Ghent; Hervaeus Natalis; Metaphysics; Plato; Phenomenological Psychology; Thomas Aquinas, St.; William of Ockham.
Bibliography
Works
Tractatus de Paupertate (1311) was printed in Firmamenta Trium Ordinum B. P. N. Francisci, Part IV, Paris, 1511, fols. 116r–129r. Tractatus de Principiis Naturae (1312) is preserved only in manuscript. De Conceptione B. M. V. and the Repercussorium (1314–1316) were printed at Quaracchi, Italy, 1904 (Bibliotheca Franciscana Scholastica medii aevi, 3). Scriptum super Primum Sententiarum (1316) was printed in Rome, 1596; E. M. Buytaert published two volumes of a superior edition comprising the Prologue and Book 1 (Distinctions 1–8), St. Bonaventure, NY: 1952–1956. Compendium Sensus Litteralis Totius Scripturae (1319) was edited by P. Seeboeck in Quaracchi, 1896. Versions of books II–IV of Sentences commentary, along with Quodlibet (1320) of sixteen questions, were published in two volumes in Rome, 1605. Other works include Compendiosa Expositio Evangelis Joannis, edited by Friedrich Stegmüller, in Franziskanische Studien, Vol. 33, 1951, 207–219; Recommendatio et Divisio S. Scripturae; and unedited questions and sermons.
Secondary Sources
Bolyard, Charles. "Knowing Naturaliter: Auriol's Propositional Foundations." Vivarium 38 (2000): 162–76.
Friedman, Russell L. "Peter Auriol on Intentions and Essential Predication." In Medieval Analyses in Language and Cognition: Acts of the Symposium. The Copenhagen School of Medieval Philosophy, edited by Sten Ebbesen and Russell L. Friedman, 415–430. Copenhagen: Royal Danish Academy of Sciences and Letters, 1999.
Friedman, Russell L., admin. "The Peter Auriol Home Page." Available from http://www.igl.ku.dk/∼russ/auriol.html. (This site includes information on Auriol's life and works, as well as extensive bibliography and text editions).
Halverson, James L. Peter Aureol on Predestination: A Challenge to Late Medieval Thought. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1998.
Nielsen, Lauge Olaf. "Peter Auriol's Way with Words. The Genesis of Peter Auriol's Commentaries on Peter Lombard's First and Fourth Books of the Sentences." In Mediaeval Commentaries on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, edited by G. R. Evans 149–219. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2002.
Pickavé, Martin. "Metaphysics as First Science: The Case of Peter Auriol." Documenti e studi sulla tradizione filosofica medievale 15 (2004): 487–516.
Schabel, Chris. Theology at Paris 1316–1345. Peter Auriol and the Problem of Divine Foreknowledge and Future Contingents. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate, 2000.
Tachau, Katherine H. Vision and Certitude in the Age of Ockham: Optics, Epistemology, and the Foundation of Semantics, 1250–1345. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988.
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