William of Ockham and Walter Chatton on Sensory Powers and the Materiality of Sensation

Abstract

While many thirteenth-century scholastic philosophers thought that the human powers of sensation are distinct from the human intellect, this apparent consensus collapsed in the 1320s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. The proximate cause of this transformation was Walter Chatton’s rejection of William of Ockham’s arguments that the human powers of sensation are distinct from the human intellect. This article examines Chatton’s implicit and explicit motivations for rejecting Ockham’s arguments. I show that Ockham thinks that the senses are distinct from the intellect because he holds that sensing is material and embodied in a way that thinking is not. I show that Chatton, on the other hand, sees no need to posit such a difference between sensation and thought with respect to materiality or embodiment because he thinks that nothing about the character of sensory experience shows it to be material or embodied in a way that thinking is not.