Teleology in the Ethics of Buridan

Abstract

I . TO SET THE STAGE FOR THIS STUDY, let me invoke an impression developed by Vernon Bourke from the careful researches embodied in his History. o f Ethics. It is Bourke 's view that there was a significant shift in emphasis in ethical thought during the fourteenth century, from traditional teleology to modern deontology. Thus, for many ancient thinkers, man is by nature ordered to an ultimate end, and the phi losopher 's task is to formulate the end and show how it may be attained. But for many moderns, man 's moral situation is oriented rather to the law. The philosopher 's task is to spell out that law and justify the obligation to obey it. Bourke finds the thought of Wil l iam of Ockham leading the way toward the modem conception and links this move to Ockham's nominalism and voluntarism. Without a common nature, man can hardly be oriented by nature to any ultimate end; he is thus left, as it were, face-to-face with the omnipotent divine will, obligated to obedience to divine commands which are without natural foundation. Whether or not this is the standard interpretation of Ockham's significance on this topic, it is hardly idiosyncratic. 1 cite Bourke here only because of his laudable effort to assess the significance of fourteenth-century thought in the wider framework of the history of ethics, and because of the straightforwardness of his formulations. I shall not be directly concerned with the accuracy of this interpretation. 1 shall operate rather on what I hope is a relevant tangent, using this view of Ockham as a deontological pioneer only as a point of departure. One presumes, pending possible reassessments of later medieval intellectual alignments, that the major vehicle for Ockham's influence was the via moderna, the nominalist curriculum in many universities, especially in central and eastern Europe. In those universities, ethics was studied through the standard set-text, the Nicomachean Ethics. But Ockham did not write a commentary on the Ethics. His moral doctrine is found in his Commentary on the Sentences and the Quodlibeta Septem, aimed for the most part at graduate theologians. To see the ethics taught in the nominalist curricula, one must look at commentaries on the Ethics by nominalist masters. A few of these have been studied, with some curious results. Albert of Saxony, a leading nominalist at Vienna, drew heavily from Walter Burley for his commentary. Burley was a famous opponent of Ockham on many issues and drew in turn from St. Thomas. ~ The most popular commentary seems to have been by John