The Status of the Phenomenal Appearance of the Sensory in Fourteenth-century Franciscan Thought after Duns Scotus (Peter Aureol to Adam of Wodeham)

Abstract

Franciscan thought in the 1300’s, starting with Duns Scotus, is quite a revolution in terms of a shift to relying on sensory and phenomenal experience in the construction of cognitive theories.1 However, we do not yet understand the full extent of its convergence with modern and contemporary thought. In what follows, we intend to advance this understanding. The experiential tendency in early fourteenth-century thought is undermined by a Cartesian-style doubt about the reliability of sensory perception and phenomenal experience that stems from the 63rd proposition of the Condemnations of 1277, which rejects the thesis that “God cannot produce the effect of a secondary cause without the secondary cause itself ”:2 a position frequently repeated by the authors discussed below. The position implies that all of our sensory and phenomenal experiences at least in principle could exist without any real things standing behind them. The issue of the status of phenomenal appearances, or the results of sensory perception or operation of other mental faculties that project a picture of what is interpreted variously as “reality,” “external world,” etc., is not new. It is raised in the Hindu and Buddhist thought long before Greek thought. Descriptions of hallucinations, visual illusions, and altered mental states abound, such as a rope appearing as a snake or one’s phenomenal field being colored yellow or red from a diseased condition