John of Mirecourt

John of Mirecourt (* 1300, † after 1349, Latin Johannes de Mercuria ) was a philosopher and theologian in Paris. He is considered an important representative of nominalism.

Life

John comes from the town of Mirecourt in Lorraine, his exact circumstances are unknown. He joined the Cistercian Order, and was initially a monk at Citeaux. He then studied in Paris.

In 1345 he delivered a lecture on the Sentences of Peter Lombard. A year later, he had to defend his thesis before 41 Parisian theologians. 1347 were censored and entered in the list of the condemned in Paris theorems 63 of his theses. He defended himself with two written justifications, the so-called apologies. John was not the only Parisian professor whose theses were censored by the university or church.

About his life after 1347 is not known.

Philosophy

Causal relationships

John of Mirecourts philosophy is strongly influenced by nominalism William of Ockham and others, especially the English commentators. He denied in principle the existence of necessary causal relationships: God can act at any time in any account of its absolute power ( potentia absoluta). The world is the result of his free will. What we perceive with our senses, our experience is only a temporal sequence of events and not due to a causal effect. Only the law of contradiction is absolutely evident. A sentence whose negation involves no logical contradiction is not absolutely evident.

Proofs of God

John of Mirecourt turned thus also against measures based on the principle of causality proofs of God: All the arguments for God's existence based on statements that are based on experience. But sentences about experience can be negated without this leads to a logical contradiction. Therefore, the existence of God is of no highest evidence ( evidentia potissima ), but only a evidentia naturalis.

Hallucinations

Something not real can not be the subject of visual perception according to John. Hallucinations are the result of erroneous judgments:

" In hallucinations man sees only what is what is not being and not an entity receives through the power of seeing, even if the deluded judges, he saw something that he does not see. "

Who drives in a boat on the water does not see that the trees move past him, but he sees the trees in each of changed perspective. The judgment that the trees would move is a mistake. But just as the sensory perception has the abstract recognizing a constitutive, seinsbegründende function. True sets can rarely be attributed to the principle of the unavoidable contradiction. In addition, an intervention of God is always a possibility, which could interfere with the normal course of nature because of its absolute power. Therefore human knowledge never gelange beyond mere probability. This character only a conditional certainty, all sentences that express an outer experience and relate to the existence or property of an external cause.

Effect

The work of John Mirecourts was in Italy, the territory of the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation, Poland, France and Spain spread. He was considered one of the most important representatives of nominalism. In an edict of Louis XI. from 1474 he was cited and convicted again. Later he fell into oblivion.

Works

• Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard
• Apologies ( justifications )