Robert Greystones on Certainty and Skepticism. Selections from His Works ed. by Robert Andrews, Jennifer Ottman and Mark Henninger

Abstract

Reviewed by: Robert Greystones on Certainty and Skepticism. Selections from His Works ed. by Robert Andrews, Jennifer Ottman and Mark Henninger Severin V. Kitanov ANDREWS, Robert, Jennifer Ottman, and Mark Henninger, editors. Robert Greystones on Certainty and Skepticism. Selections from His Works. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020. lvii + 528 pp. Cloth, $190.00 The second volume of critically edited texts of Robert Greystones’s works is a welcome addition to the treasure house of fourteenth-century scholastic writings available in English translation. The edition completes our knowledge of the intellectual contribution of this little-known Benedictine author (ca. 1290–1334) and augments our understanding of the history of skepticism in medieval thought. Dedicated to the memory of the renowned contemporary Anglo-American analytic philosopher and Ockham specialist—the Reverend Professor Marilyn McCord Adams—the volume revisits the Cartesian theme of hyperbolic doubt in light of its strikingly similar precedent in Greystones’s Sentences-commentary. Even though rare in early scholasticism (one exception being John of Salisbury), skepticism becomes a viable alternative to epistemological realism as a result of the consistent use of the distinction between God’s ordained and absolute power in early fourteenth-century thought. This use was sanctioned by the 1277 Parisian Condemnation of proposition 63, which states that “God cannot produce the effect of a secondary cause without the secondary cause itself,” and which was perceived by Bishop Stephen Tempier as imposing a restriction on God’s omnipotence. Most remarkable, however, according to the volume’s editors, is the extreme character of the implications Greystones derives from the radical principles of his immediate predecessors (especially William of Ockham). On the ground of “an overhanging possibility of divine intervention,” which can distort the regular flow of physical and psychic events at any given instant, Greystones reaches a degree of skepticism matched only by Descartes’s strategy of exaggerated doubt. Thus, we cannot have certain knowledge of the existence of extramental things, of causal connections, or of substances. There is no knowledge from induction and experience, and there is no moral knowledge. We cannot even know that our intellect is embodied, or to which body it is conjoined, or that it is an attribute or faculty of an immaterial soul. Since theology does not satisfy the strict criteria for knowledge—that is, it does not involve cognitions based on the transparency of terms or on evident entailments from terms or effects—the habit of theology is not by its very nature scientific. Pace Descartes, we cannot even rule out divine deception since we can only believe but do not know that “God is not a deceiver.” Yet, there are things of which we can be absolutely certain: for instance, that I live or that I exist, and that I have a sensory perception (phenomenological evidence). We know these things because they are inseparable from our being as an intellect and as a perceiver. Not even God can separate the thought that I live or that I am from the intellect that thinks it, or the perception from the perceiver. This is a matter of logic expressed in the form of the “principle of separability,” which the editors describe as a corollary to the distinction between God’s ordained and absolute power. Considering the modern sensibility manifest in Greystones’s uncompromising skeptical stance in both natural philosophy and theology, the relevance of the edition becomes evident at once: Notwithstanding the difference of the [End Page 137] historical context—a worldview infused by Aristotelian metaphysical and epistemological assumptions—Greystones not only anticipates but reasons through the skeptical moves and positions embraced by early modern philosophers such as Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume. The lesson historians of theology can learn, on the other hand, is that the difference between lay and expert believers is not that the experts have certain knowledge of theological truths whereas lay believers only have faith, but that theology understood as a professional expertise involves a more holistic understanding of how revealed truths hang together as a system. Greystones states explicitly that he is not aware of any place in scripture where one can proceed from what is more known to what is less known. If such kind of...