ABSTRACT
In 1277, the Bishop of Paris, Stephen Tempier, prohibited the teaching of 219 theological and philosophical theses that had been maintained by unnamed members of the Faculty of Arts at the University of Paris. The prohibition, which has come to be known as the Condemnation of 1277, is often treated as a signi cant turning point in medieval philosophy and theology. Among the prohibited theses were 16 propositions about the will and its freedom. The condemned propositions are a somewhat disparate group, but many of them concern the dependence of the will on the intellect. For example, teachers in the arts faculty were forbidden to teach that the rational soul is “in potency to opposites”—roughly what we would express nowadays by saying that it has the power to do otherwise-only because reason can know opposites; they were forbidden to maintain “that the will necessarily pursues what is rmly held by reason, and that it cannot abstain from that which reason dictates.” Both of those theses had arguably been taught by Thomas Aquinas, who had died three years before-though he had been in the Faculty of Theology, not Arts, and scholars disagree about whether Aquinas was a target of the Condemnation (for a convincing case that he was, see Wippel 1995). The Condemnation encourages a picture of freedom in which the will is free in its own right, and not merely because of its association with reason, and indeed, is free to act contrary to reason, rather than being in some sense necessitated by what reason holds.
