No abstract

This chapter consists of a systematic introduction to the nature and function of habitus in Latin medieval philosophy. Over the course of this introduction, several topics are treated: the theoretical necessity to posit habitus; their nature; their causal contribution to the production of internal and external acts; how and why habitus can grow and decay; what makes their unity when they can have multiple objects and work in clusters. Finally, we examine two specific questions: why intellectual habitus represent a special case that triggered considerable debate; how human beings can be said to be free if their actions are determined by moral habitus.

While a habitus can be described as a disposition towards a certain type of act, such a definition is not sufficient to encompass the diversity of uses the medieval thinkers made of this concept. It is the aim of this paper to examine the habitus of faith in the voluntarist Franciscan tradition in order to illustrate several of its functions and how these varied from author to author. Studying how the habitus of faith works for Bonaventure, Peter John Olivi and John Duns Scotus allows us to examine different takes on these functions and illustrate the variety of possible positions even within a tradition that emphasizes the freedom and agency of the moral subject above all. We will emphasize the capacity a habitus grants to pick out its proper objects, in the present case, the objects of faith; the capacity to elicit certain acts that without it would not have been possible or at least that would not have had the moral value the habitus grants them; the capacity to unite several powers in the accomplishment of a given act.

No abstract

The chapter starts out with a brief discussion of the similarity alleged to exist by the editors of William Ockham's Ordinatio between a series of opinions canvassed by Ockham on the nature of universals and a series of opinions listed by James of Viterbo on the nature of concepts. It then proceeds to expound James's little known theory of concepts and universals, and concludes that, despite interesting parallels between his views and those of the Veneralibilis Inceptor, James's theory is still very much committed to the realist assumptions that Ockham thought metaphysics needed to dispense with.