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This book presents a series of studies by the late Marilyn McCord Adams of medieval philosophical and theological views regarding the powers that govern human psychological processes. She explores which of them were taken to be ours to exercise and control, and which to be controlled and exercised only by God.
List of contents
- Introduction and Cast of Characters
- 1: Medieval Architecture of Matter, Form, and Powers
- 2: Housing the Powers: Self-Actuation and Cosmic Design
- 3: Debates about Potentialities and their Relations to Being
- 4: with Cecilia Trifogli: Outsourcing the Subject: Whose Thought Is It?
- 5: Outsourcing the Object: Divine Illumination. I: Early Franciscans and Henry of Ghent
- 6: Outsourcing the Object: Divine Illumination. II: Henry of Ghent and Scotus
- 7: Scotus and his Predecessors on the Metaphysics of Habits
- 8: Genuine Agency, somehow Shared? The Holy Spirit and Other Gifts
About the author
Marilyn McCord Adams was Regius Professor of Divinity and Canon of Christ Church from 2004-9, before returning to the USA to take up the post of Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (2009-13), and then Distinguished Research Professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University (2013-15).
Professor Adams' work in philosophy focused on the philosophy of religion, especially the problem of evil, philosophical theology, metaphysics, and medieval philosophy.
Summary
Housing the powers? What powers? Soul powers -- powers that shape the lives of human souls. They may be housed, and exercised, by those souls or by other agents. This book is about views on that subject developed by Christian philosophical theologians in western Europe from the mid-12th to the early 14th century, with some borrowing of thoughts from their Islamic counterparts. Chapters 1 to 3 discuss in increasing breadth and depth those theologians' views about their own housing and exercise of soul powers. Chapters 4 to 8 discuss their views as to the possibility of some of our soul powers being outsourced -- that is, housed and exercised by God or a super-human emanation of God. Chapter 4 is about outsourcing the subject -- in an Islamic form that postulated an outsourcing of intellectual thinking from individual human beings to a single intellect that is eternally emanated from God and is the sole thinker of all the thoughts that humans ever think. That theory attracted the interest, though not the agreement, of European Christian philosophers. They found ideas of outsourcing the object, rather than the subject, of religious thought more congenial. The remaining four chapters of the book deal with that more congenial topic. In chapters 5 and 6 the focus is mainly on divine gifts of knowledge and understanding, and in chapters 7 and 8 on gifts of action and willing or desire.
Additional text
I find most of the interpretative claims that Adams defends in Housing the Powers convincing. I am confident that her book will soon become standard reading for anyone working on Latin medieval theories of causal powers.
