Mind-Body Dualism

Corporeal entities are not capable of the kind of reflexivity required for freedom, Olivi argues. In intentionality, there is a distinction between the subject and the object, and in divisible matter this makes the subject and the object necessarily distinct things, whereas in self-reflexivity the subject and the object are the same. Thus, the free, intellectual soul must be incorporeal. Olivi does not, however, give up the Aristotelian universality of the form-matter distinction. He accepts that all individuals consist of matter and form, but claims that the human soul informs two distinct kinds of matter: the corporeal and the spiritual. As the intellectual part of the soul does not inform any corporeal matter, the human soul is the form of the body only in respect to its sensitive part. The intellectual soul informing spiritual matter becomes, thus, a full-fledged individual capable of existence and its own kinds of action even in separation from the body.

Some authorities within the church saw Olivi’s view as denying the true doctrine that the soul is the form of the body, and condemned the view. However, many important later thinkers, for example, William of Ockham, followed Olivi in affirming that the intellectual soul is genuinely independent from the body and capable of existing by itself as an individual. As the idea of spiritual matter was given up, Olivi’s theory can be seen as a direct predecessor of Rene Descartes’ seventeenth-century dualism.

Olivi held strongly to the view that the mind is active and that corporeal bodies are passive. He describes sensory perception in terms of an intentional relation where the mind comports to the world, thus rejecting the standard Aristotelian model where corporeal things act upon the sensory and cognitive systems. In vision, for example, one ought not to say that the object causally produces an act of seeing, but that the soul actively produces a visual act where the object is merely a ‘‘terminative cause.’’ Looked at as a theory of attention, Olivi’s discussion contains interesting philosophical insights.