Biography

Very little is known of the Dominican William Crathorn, save that he entered the O. P. around 1315, and active in Oxford in the early 1330s. Crathorn was a contemporary of Robert Holcot, O. P., and appears to have been engaged in heated debate with Holcot for a time. There is no record of his presence at Oxford after this period, although his unique positions continued to attract comment in the 1360s. Crathorn’s commentary on the first book of Lombard’s Sentences is the sole source of our knowledge of his thought, although a manuscript in Vienna contains quodlibetal questions that may also be his.

Oxford theology in the early fourteenth century was very heavily influenced by Ockham’s philosophical emphasis on the relation of logic and philosophy of language on epistemological questions, demoting ontology from the pride of place it had enjoyed in thirteenth-century thought. It by no means follows that all Oxford thinkers were thereby Ockhamists; the so-called ‘‘Modern’’ approach lent itself to great variation within

Philosophical speculation, of which William Crathorn proves a very good example. (It should be understood that the term moderni was understood to mean thinkers roughly contemporary to whoever was using it. Before the condemnation of Wycliffism in the late fourteenth century, when the term was used to mean positions opposed to Wyclif’s realism, the term was not used to refer to one specific philosophical position. Everyone from Thomas and Scotus onward could count as ‘‘modern.’’) Crathorn’s Sentence commentary is characterized by the epistemologically oriented approach of the Moderni, but his philosophical conclusions were sufficiently divergent from the mainstream as to lead Robert Holcot to comment that one should only read Crathorn for amusement. In an age when it was common to make few personal references to proponents of opposing philosophical viewpoints, this kind of comment is remarkable. It is very likely that Crathorn’s thought was very widely discussed in Oxford from the 1330s through the 1370s, as is evidenced by Wyclif’s hostile references to positions associated with him.

The hallmark of Crathorn’s philosophy was a development of the then common notion that human knowledge is reliant on the species of objects perceived, a position developed initially by Roger Bacon, whose model of perception was inspired by medieval optics. When we perceive a given object, what we perceive is a result of the emitted appearances, or species, of the object. This is analogous to the refraction of an object through a lens; given the medium of light, when a lens is held up to a object, an image of that object is produced on the other side of the lens. This image, the species of the object, is what we perceive with our senses. It has a lesser form of being than the substance that produces it, but it has sufficient being as to convey likeness of that substance. Crathorn adopted this optically oriented epistemological model, but added a significant limitation: he eliminated the mental act normally associated with receiving the perceived species in the mind from his account. That is, he believed there to be no grounds for distinguishing between the cognitive power and the acts it might produce. Aquinas’ model of cognition, in which there are four elements at play (soul, powers, acts, and species) typified thirteenth-century epistemology. Ockham had eliminated the distinction between soul and powers, identifying the two, and had done away with species, emphasizing the cognitive power’s direct perception ofthe object. Crathorn agreed with Ockham in identifying the soul and its powers, retained species in the formula, and arguing against the distinction between a power and the acts that arise from it. This left the Soul, or mind, and the species. The mind receives the species, which reflect the qualities of the object perceived, which results in the mind acquiring the qualities of the object perceived. Hence, when I perceive a black cat, the species of the cat contain the qualities of felinity, blackness, quadrupedality, and so forth; when the species enters my mind, my mind becomes a substantial foundation for felinity, blackness, quadrupedality, and so forth. In effect, my idea of the black cat is, to a very real extent, black cat-like in all the qualities associated with the being of the cat. It is this aspect of Crathorn’s thought that led Holcot to his derisory comment; considered charitably, it is unique to scholastic epistemology.

The first question to arise from such a remarkable position is whether the species we perceive is veridical. That is, how can we be certain that the species of the black cat that is identical to our idea of the black cat we perceive is the same as the qualities as they exist in the black cat itself? Obviously, the species is not identical to the qualities that produce the appearance, so the question stands: what is the grounds for certainty that the species fully embody the qualities of the substance in question? Ockham’s position adroitly avoids this question by eliminating the intermediary species in favor of our direct perception of the object itself, but Crathorn’s departure from Ockham leads him to a position familiar to anyone familiar with Descartes. The species of skepticism Crathorn faces is different, then, from that arising from Ockham’s conviction that God can cause us to perceive objects that do not exist. Ockham’s arises from a consideration of God’s absolute power, while Crathorn’s arises naturally from his epistemology. Crathorn’s response is similar to Ockham’s, depending on the unlikelihood of God’s leading people into error, but it plays a much greater role in Crathorn’s thought than it does in Ockham’s. Elsewhere, Crathorn argues against skepticism by relying on Augusine’s si fallor, sum, a then widely known counter to traditional skepticism.

While his epistemology represents a remarkable departure from the Moderni norm, Crathorn’s ontology is slightly more commensurate with Ockhamist conceptualism. Ockhamists generally had reduced the ten Aristotelian categories to just two, substance and quality; the latter serving as ontological basis for the remaining eight. Crathorn’s position, arising from his epistemology, prevents him from distinguishing with certainty between species of substance and species of quality, leading him to suggest that the categories are primarily conventional. There are objects, and the species we perceive suggest Ockham’s division between substance and qualities, but we lack the certain evidence we would need to construct a complex ontological account of things in the world. Crathorn was among the Oxford indivisibilists, or atomists, who argued for the

Existence of fundamentally indivisible constituents of a continuum. Opinions varied regarding the nature and number of these atomic units; some argued for a potentially infinite number of indivisibles in a finite continuum, while others stipulated that a finite continuum must be composed of a finite number of atomic units. Crathorn was among the latter, and he seems to have advocated a somewhat richer atomism than others, holding these indivisible elements to be discrete, kind-defined beings.

Given Crathorn’s skepticism regarding the categories, and the uncertainty about the similarity relation holding between the species we perceive and the objects behind the species, one might well ask what Crathorn believed there to be that we perceive. Crathorn argued that when we perceive a black cat, there is more involved than simply the perceiving subject and the perceived object; when we make a judgment like ‘‘the cat is black’’ we are referring to a complex that serves as the basis for our proposition. Crathorn’s position is different from Wodeham’s complex significable in that he does not seem to have worked out the philosophical arguments need to account for what might correspond to statements about nonexistent object, or assertions like ‘‘man is not an ass.’’ Crathorn’s account of propositions is further complicated by his rejection of the mental language that many of his contemporaries believed to be the primary mode of formulating mental propositions prior to their semantic articulation in a conventional language. Because there is no distinction between the mental power and the mental act, there is no space in Crathorn’s philosophy of mind for the distinction between the cognition of the species and the translation of the cognition into a conventional language. Further, the linguistic apparatus by which complex propositions are formulated, including verbs, substance-terms, syncategoremata, and so forth are not contained within the cognition. Hence, when we translate the cognition into the semantic expression of the proposition, we use the conventional language that has been developed by the linguistic community in which we have been raised.

See also: > Atomism > Epistemology > John Wyclif > Robert Holcot > Skepticism > William of Ockham