The Pre-eminence of the Will in the Philosophical Anthropology of Petrus Iohannis Olivi

The aim of this project is to position the philosophy of the will, that was expounded by the later mediaeval Franciscan thinker, Petrus Iohannis Olivi (1248/49-1298), within a far more comprehensive context than has so far been attempted. Since the time when the Jesuit scholar Franz Ehrle instigated modern research upon Olivi and the mediaeval Franciscan spirituals in his groundbreaking articles of the 1880s, the further work that has since been done has remained remarkably compartmentalised. Academics have, as a rule, focused in upon their own particular field of expertise, with specialists in philosophy concentrating upon Olivi`s various quaestiones upon Lombard`s sentences; spiritual theologians upon Olivi`s more practical writings concerning the nature and practice of the Franciscan religious life; and cultural historians pursuing further the foundations that had been laid by Franz Erhle. One general overview does exist, the American scholar, David Burr`s The Persecution of Peter Olivi (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 1976), which remains by far the soundest and most thorough introduction to Olivi`s life and thinking. His purpose, however, is rather to identify the various biographical, cultural, and conceptual threads that constitute the phenomenon that we have come to know as `Petrus Iohannis Olivi` rather than to analyse how, in (critical-) theoretical terms, these threads come together to illumine pivotal nodes in Olivi`s thought. As a consequence of its comprehensive approach, the evisaged research singles out for investigation what is arguably Olivi`s foundational philosophical premise, namely the absolutely undetermined nature of the human will, and analyses it in its broader context. The project will work centrifugally out from this node, the first step being to look discretely at Olivi`s philosophy of the will in its own scholastic terms, positioning it within the various traditions of philosophising upon the will that Olivi had inherited from his pagan and Christian predecessors. The second step will be to position this philosophy within the much wider context of Olivi`s anthropology. Olivi`s thoughts upon the will will be seen to constitute a pivotal element in his philosophical vision of human personhood, as projected in his more abstractly conceptual scholastic writings. The third step will be to identify the empirical grounds from which the philosophy that is expressed in the sentential writings arises. From this point, a centripetal movement of investigation will begin that leads back to the springs of Olivi`s thought. The more abstract scholastic philosophy will be read critically from the perspective of three existential contexts: 1. Olivi`s Franciscan inheritance; 2. Olivi`s Joachimist inheritance; 3. Olivi`s cultural inheritance as a native of Languedoc. Not only the illuminative insights but also the aporias within Olivi`s philosophy of the will will be disengaged through critical juxtaposition of more abstractly theoretical against more pressingly existential contexts.

This project constitutes the first body of writing to investigate closely all the different dimensions (soul, body, intellect, will, emotions, senses, drives and instincts) of Peter John Olivis (1248-98) philosophical anthropology, and to relate it closely to its academic and cultural context. The most significant scholarly advance made in this research project has arguably been to demonstrate what was, for his age, Olivis remarkably original approach to criticising the positions of his philosophical adversaries in regard to the status of the will in the human subjective economy. Rather than simply summarizing the position to which he is opposed, and then presenting arguments against this position, Olivi takes a specific text of an opponent this might be, for example, Siger of Brabant, Thomas Aquinas, Avicenna, or Aristotle and constructs a whole question, or section of a question, as a systematic reply that mirrors the structure of the text of a chosen opponent. This text thereby becomes a form of contrapuntal ground against which Olivi frames his argument. Close analyses of how this inter-textual method actually operates have been published in peer-reviewed journals.A second major advance made in the project has been to show that previous scholars have unjustly criticised Olivi for weak or obscure argument or, perhaps worse, for failing to read the writings of his adversaries with sufficient care. This unjust assessment has almost invariably resulted from a failure to identify an intertextual method of criticism that is peculiarly Olivis own.A third advance has been to place Olivis writings ? most particularly, the questions on human nature in his Commentary on the Second Book of Lombards Sentences ? far more securely in their historical and cultural context. On the one hand, this is the city of Paris in the years before and after the Parisian Condemnation of 7 March, 1277. It is the city where Olivi had been a student (and perhaps also later an occasional teacher) at the Franciscan International House of Studies between 1266/1267 and sometime between 1271/1274. The close textual study of Olivis writings that the project has embarked upon shows just how involved he in fact was in the academic debates of the period: most particularly in terms of the project, his reaction to deterministic theories disseminated at the University of Paris that he saw as threatening the belief that human beings were able to act freely of their own accord. It is out of this very concrete Parisian environment that his own personal theory of the pre-eminence of the will in the human subjective economy took shape. The project demonstrates this profound environmental influence through both identifying and analysing, with far greater precision than has so far been done, the different voices (i.e. often concealed or implicit references to texts of his contemporaries, and to those of the thinkers who most influenced his contemporaries) that inhabit Olivis actual texts. The counter-balance to this Parisian environment is the culture of Languedoc, into which Olivi was born, and where he first studied as a Franciscan. Without a consideration of this environment (both as it existed within and outside the Franciscan Order), the radicality of Olivis emphasis on the pre-eminence of the will cannot adequately be explained. This is also shown through a close examination of the cultural implications within specific texts.