Nicholas of Autrecourt

French philosopher

• Born: c. 1300
• Birthplace: Autrecourt, near Verdun, France
• Died: After 1350
• Place of death: Probably Metz, Lorraine, France

Nicholas’s thought on certainty and uncertainty in knowledge anticipated some of the discoveries of the eighteenth century Scottish philosopher David Hume and later rationalists and empiricists. He contributed to the end of high Scholastic thought by proposing a form of radical nominalism critical of the Aristotelian notions of substance and causation.

Early Life

Nicholas of Autrecourt (oh-truh-cohr) was born in the French diocese of Verdun, a region that was also the birthplace of two other iconoclastic contemporaries, James of Metz and John of Mirecourt. Of Nicholas’s early youth, little is known, though he apparently proved himself a bright boy, matriculating at the University of Paris and living as a fellow of the Sorbonne between 1320 and 1327.

During the time Nicholas was a student, the University of Paris was, intellectually, an especially exhilarating place. Change was in the air. By the fourteenth century, the seams of the much-patched fabric of Scholastic synthesis had begun to unravel rapidly because the internal oppositions between Christian theology and Aristotelian metaphysics and Aristotelian logic were becoming more and more obvious.

The criticism of Scholasticism that resulted from the need to resolve these oppositions was not, however, an entirely new creation. It was an outgrowth of the logical methods of Scholasticism itself. Thus when William of Ockham personally carried his nominalistic philosophy to France to answer the charge of heretical and erroneous opinions before the papal commission at Avignon in 1324, he was greeted by the professors of the University of Paris as a fellow laborer. It is impossible to discount the influence of both the rise of nominalism and the Parisian intellectual atmosphere on Nicholas’s intellectual development, even though Nicholas’s philosophy cannot, in any proper sense, be considered a form of Ockhamism.

Shortly after completing his studies in 1327, Nicholas received his licentiate in theology and the degrees of master of arts and bachelor of theology and laws. Appropriately equipped, he embarked on an academic career at his alma mater. His tenure at the University of Paris, which lasted from 1327 to 1340, represents the period of his greatest accomplishment.

Life’s Work

It was during his tenure as an academic that Nicholas wrote the controversial works that helped shape the intellectual scene of the fourteenth century. Unfortunately, the fragmentary nature of the surviving corpus makes it impossible to describe the full scope of his thought. Of Nicholas’s commentaries on the writings of Aristotle and Peter Lombard , all that survives comes from the replies of Jean Buridan in his commentaries on Aristotle’s Physica (c. 335-323 b.c.e.; Physics, 1812) and Metaphysica (c. 335-323 b.c.e.; Metaphysics, 1801) and those of Thomas of Strassburg in his commentary on Peter Lombard’s Sententiarum libri IV (1148-1151; The Books of Opinions of Peter Lombard, 1970; better known as Sentences). The only surviving Nicholatian texts are two complete letters and fragments of five others written to Bernard of Arezzo, an almost complete letter to Egidius, an answer to a theological question, and a philosophical treatise entitled Exigit ordo (The Universal Treatise of Nicholas of Autrecourt, 1971). All were written before 1340, the Exigit ordo apparently being the last. Only the two complete letters have been translated into English in their entirety. It is on the basis of this motley collection of works that any reconstruction of the main themes of Nicholas’s philosophy proceeds.

Nicholas’s philosophical starting point is the logical principle of noncontradiction: A thing cannot be and not be something at the same time. All arguments formed to arrive at truth that do not follow from the principle of noncontradiction are merely probable. Only deductive arguments that presuppose this principle are absolutely certain.

Nicholas distinguishes two kinds of certainty that characterize different forms of experience: the certainty of faith and the certainty of evidence. The certainty of faith is guaranteed by God’s grace, is subjective, and is thus beyond the criticism of philosophers. One who has it finds it supernaturally indubitable, and nothing more can be said; it is its own proof. The second variety of certainty is the proper province of philosophers. It is called the certainty of evidence and is characterized by admitting no degrees. Either the evidence produces certainty or it does not. Nicholas does maintain that the certainty of evidence comes in two varieties: the certainty of evidence about simple things and the certainty of evidence about complex things. By the former, Nicholas means the certainty of inner perception or experience; by the latter, he means the certainty of propositions. The principle of noncontradiction can be used to test both varieties.

In some of his writings, Nicholas provides demonstrations as to how the criterion of noncontradiction can be applied to simple and complex judgments. In the case of perception (simple certainty), he argues the impossibility of separating judgments of existence associated with perception from the perceptions themselves. In other words, to perceive a color and to be aware that one is perceiving a color are inseparable acts. To maintain that one perceives a color and that one is not, at the same time, conscious of perceiving a color is a contradiction. From this Nicholas draws the inference that everyone perceives his or her own existence. To maintain that the perception of existence is possible without a consciousness of that existence is a contradiction; to maintain this is to assert that there can be a perception without something doing the perceiving.

In the case of complex things (or propositions), Nicholas provides a number of analogous arguments that show that the certainty of propositions, too, depends on the principle of noncontradiction. If it were possible to be certain about a proposition that was not dependent on the principle of noncontradiction, then this act would be tantamount to saying that one could be certain about a proposition that could be either true or false, or more subtly that one could be certain about a proposition that appears true and yet is possibly false. Yet certainty does not allow the possibility of falsehood. The only recourse, then, is to rest the judgment of propositions on a principle that guarantees that certainty is achieved only when conclusions are reached that cannot fail to be true or about which there is no possibility of falsehood. The principle of noncontradiction alone meets this requirement.

Nicholas characterizes certain propositional knowledge as that variety that modern logical positivists term “tautologous.” When Nicholas asserts that “A is P and therefore it is not the case that A is not P,” he construes that relationship not in the manner of medieval Aristotelians, who thought of it either as the relation between a substance and another higher genera or as the relation between a substance and its accident. Rather, he construes that relationship in the manner of some modern logicians who see the relationship between A and P as being simply that between an object and one of the predicates that make it what it is. According to Nicholas, there is no substance underlying the perceptions of the object.

Because the Aristotelian substance is beyond the five senses, it can never be an object of a perception. Nor can it be an object entertained in a proposition, because propositions depend on the five senses to flesh out their content. The Scholastic discussions of substance, accidents, and efficient causation were mere babble to Nicholas. In their place, he substitutes a kind of phenomenalistic Democritean atomism. The only realities are atoms of quality that in momentary confluence present themselves as things; the only real things are the perceptible combinations of these qualities.

It is possible to have certainty about the judgment of perception associated with these things, but this certainty lasts only as long as the things are present. Certainty is momentary and cannot be extended to judgments about the past or future behavior of things. The existence of a thing at one time cannot be inferred from the existence of another thing at another time, because neither can be put into a relation of identity or of part to whole. One’s only recourse is to count up the number of conjunctions and decide the probability of their occurring together in sequence. Moreover, if that is the best one can do for perceptible things, then it is impossible to talk about the causal relations that hold between nonperceptible things such as substances, because probable demonstrations require, at the very least, perceptible things. Because an Aristotelian substance is not perceptible and because only correlations, not perceptible relations, can be found between perceptible things, it is impossible to establish a probable correlation between a substance and a perceptible thing or a substance and another substance.

With arguments such as these, Nicholas was able to challenge some of the most cherished thinking of the accepted Aristotelian metaphysics. Of all of his criticisms, the most devastating were his critiques of the Scholastic proofs of God’s existence. Because these proofs relied heavily on the Aristotelian notions of substance, cause, and accident, Nicholas was able to demonstrate that even a probable proof making use of these notions was impossible. The irony of Nicholas’s critique is that he used the most fundamental principle of Aristotelian logic: the principle of noncontradiction.

The controversy surrounding the audacity, brilliance, and rigor of Nicholas’s philosophy spread across France like a brushfire. By 1338, his prominence as an academic had become so great that he was made a canon of the cathedral at Metz and given a prebend’s stall. This honor did not come with a condition of residency but was a comfortable stipend that allowed Nicholas to pursue advanced study. This he did in comfort, until 1339, when a decree was issued by the faculty of arts accusing students and some of the faculty of insubordination as evidenced by their study of nominalistic philosophy and the meeting of secret nominalistic conclaves. This decree was followed, in December of 1340, by further, more severe decrees against Ockhamism as well as a request from Pope Benedict XII that Nicholas and other Parisian professors critical of Scholastic Aristotelianism appear before the Papal Curia at Avignon. The first papal inquiry was postponed because Benedict died shortly after issuing his summons, but on May 19, 1342, Pope Clement VI reopened the inquiry by appointing a commission of Inquisition under the directorship of William, Cardinal Curty.

Before this commission, Nicholas defended himself with great skill and subtlety. He made it clear that his thought was proposed with the intention of fruitful discussion alone, that his philosophy was designed to reveal the weaknesses of the Scholastic synthesis so that these might be remedied; it was not designed to pull the Scholastic edifice down. He also pointed out that at no time had he denied any of the dogmatic declarations of the Church and urged that when one of his probable arguments stood in contradiction to dogma, the argument should be understood as false. Cardinal Curty, for the most part, remained unmoved. He termed Nicholas’s counterarguments “foxy excuses” and produced a list of sixty condemned propositions.

Uncertain of his fate, Nicholas fled from Avignon and went briefly into hiding, probably in the court of Ludwig of Bavaria. In 1346, he was summoned to Paris to recant the condemned propositions, to burn his writings, and to be stripped of his academic credentials. On November 25, 1347, after recanting his philosophy and being discharged from the faculty of the University of Paris, Nicholas watched as his collected works were publicly burned.

Although disgraced in the eyes of the Church, Nicholas lived the rest of his life in its bosom. In 1350, he was made a deacon at the cathedral of Metz, and in the document recording this event is found the final mystery in this controversialist’s life: He is described as possessing the licentiate in sacred theology, a license that ought to have been taken from him when he was discredited. It is possible that the authorization to teach sacred theology was officially restored by the Church sometime after his public recantation, or perhaps this mention was merely an act of charity on the part of the clerics at Metz, who had always appreciated Nicholas’s brilliance. About the remainder of his life, little is known.

Significance

It is difficult to measure the direct influence Nicholas of Autrecourt had on Western theological and philosophical development since no Nicholatian school survived the conflagration of 1347. Nicholas is most important not for the direct force he exercised in shaping Western thought but for his part in the rise of nominalistic philosophy that characterized the fourteenth century and that was the herald of empirical natural philosophy, the death of the Aristotelian metaphysic, and the birth of the Reformation.

Even so, Nicholas’s philosophy did directly shape the fashion in which more traditional theologians and philosophers, such as Jean Buridan and Thomas of Strassburg, read and interpreted Aristotle and their more immediate predecessors. Moreover, in many respects, Nicholas’s thought was modern, and in fact, quite prescient. In accepting the law of noncontradiction as the cornerstone of certainty, he anticipated the thought of the rationalists and their more geometrico. In his insistence on the primacy of perception and the certainty associated with judgments of perception, he anticipated later empiricists. In arguing that causation could be established as probable at best, he anticipated some of the arguments of skeptical philosopher David Hume.

Finally, perhaps the most significant thing about the career of Nicholas of Autrecourt was his intellectual honesty. Using logic like a sharp scalpel, he ruthlessly cut away many of the contradictions living in the body Scholastic. The audacity of his intellectual project provides an example for anyone who finds the formulaic repetition of tired old answers unsatisfying.

Bibliography

Copleston, Frederick C. Late Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy. Vol. 3 in A History of Philosophy. New York: Image Books, 1963. One of the most thorough contemporary histories of philosophy written in English. Volume 3 provides an extensive, but very compact, exposition of Nicholas’s life, arguments, and influence within the context of fourteenth century nominalism. The end of this volume contains notes referring to the Latin sources and a multilanguage bibliography.

Copleston, Frederick C. Medieval Philosophy. New York: Harper and Bros., 1963. A pointed summary of the history of medieval philosophy. More general and accessible than the volumes in A History of Philosophy, it provides a brief overview of the period, discussing only Nicholas’s general significance to philosophy. It contains a brief bibliography of French and English works.

Hyman, Arthur, and James J. Walsh, eds. Philosophy in the Middle Ages: The Christian, Islamic, and Jewish Traditions. 2d ed. Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1983. An 805-page text that provides English translations of the first and second letters of Nicholas to Bernard of Arezzo. Also provides a brief but detailed biography of Nicholas and some comments on his importance. Includes a short bibliography.

Nicholas of Autrecourt. Nicholas of Autrecourt: His Correspondence with Master Giles and Bernard of Arezzo, a Critical Edition from the Two Parisian Manuscripts. Introduction, translation, explanatory notes, and indexes by L. M. de Rijk. New York: E. J. Brill, 1994. Provides Nicholas’s correspondence in Latin and English with two of his fourteenth century contemporaries.

Sihvola, Juha, ed. Ancient Scepticism and the Sceptical Tradition. Helsinki, Finland: Societas Philosophica Fennica, 2000. Surveys the work of philosophy, including that of Nicholas, in the tradition of skepticism, the belief in suspended judgment, and the doctrine of uncertainty in knowledge. Includes a bibliography.

Thijssen, J. M. M. H. Censure and Heresy at the University of Paris, 1200-1400. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1998. A look at the intersections between the medieval Church, education, academic freedom, and heresy, with a chapter devoted to Nicholas’s tenure at the University of Paris.

Weinberg, Julius R. Nicholas of Autrecourt: A Study in Fourteenth Century Thought. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1948. A seminal work on Nicholas’s thought that contains chapters on the theories of evidence, probability, change, and causation as well as a bibliography of the standard works.

Weinberg, Julius R. A Short History of Medieval Philosophy. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1969. This work contains a chapter on the criticism characteristic of nominalism. Provides lucid summaries of Nicholas’s logical arguments in abbreviated form. Includes a bibliography.