Crisis and Transition: The Condemnations, Scotus, and Ockham

In 1277, Étienne Tempier, bishop of Paris, issued a sweeping condemnation of 219 propositions being taught, or allegedly taught, in the university's arts faculty, targeting above all a movement modern scholars call Latin Averroism, radical Aristotelian philosophers such as Siger of Brabant and Boethius of Dacia who, working strictly within philosophy as a discipline distinct from theology, followed Aristotelian and Averroist reasoning to conclusions in tension with Christian orthodoxy, including the eternity of the world, a strong determinism in nature and human action, and, following Averroes, the unity of the possible intellect across all human beings, which threatened individual personal immortality. The condemned propositions also asserted, controversially, that God's absolute power was constrained by what Aristotelian natural philosophy deemed possible, propositions Tempier's decree explicitly rejected as limiting divine omnipotence. Although aimed chiefly at radical Aristotelians, several propositions on the list bore an uncomfortable resemblance to positions associated with Thomas Aquinas's own philosophy, who had died three years earlier, in 1274, and the precise scope and target of the condemnation remains genuinely disputed among historians of medieval philosophy.