Renaissance Grice

By JLS
for the GC

Grice (Herbert Grice, Grice's father) was a determinist. And a violin player. He was an incomformist. He was a bit of a Renaissance man. So was Pomponazzi, for different reasons. They were bound to be incomformists. Grice inherited (from his father, not from Pomponazzi) this 'irreverent rationalism'.

Seeing that he is cited by Harris in a footnote, this below from Stanford Encycl. Pietro Pomponazzi (1462-1525) should be of help.

Renaissance Italian philosopher. For Pomponazzi, the moral autonomy of the wise man, expressing itself in his free exercise of virtue, is the trait which distinguishes him from the masses who are subject to external laws of conduct. In his treatise on free will ("De libero arbitrio") (1520), the most complex of his works, he considers whether the human will can be free, faced with the conflicting point of view of philosophical Determinism.
The intricate structure of this treatise, which intermingles interpretation and speculation, makes it difficult to establish which views Pomponazzi himself actually held (as can be seen from the differing accounts of this work which have been advanced by scholars: see Ingegno; Scribano; Pine 1986, 275-343; 1999; Poppi 1988; Ramberti). The fact that Latin was not his mother tongue did not help.
The treatise is structured as follows. In Books I-II, Pomponazzi investigates, on the level of philosophy, the compatibility between the divine government of the world and human freewill, specifically in light of the contrast between the position defended by Alexander of Aphrodisias in "De fato", that the human will is able to choose between two equally possible alternatives, and the deterministic Stoic theories which Alexander criticizes.
Pomponazzi ends up by submitting freewill to the Determinism of natural laws.
In Books III-V, Pomponazzi moves onto a theological plane, searching for a way to reconcile the indeterminacy of human freedom and the immutability of divine foreknowledge. The main precondition of human "liberum arbitrium" is the contingency of the sublunary (a Greek notion, originally, 'hyposelenikos') world, that is, the possibility that events of undetermined outcome may occur, so that our will is able to choose freely between two equally possible alternatives (as Alexander claimed in "De Fato"). Pomponazzi, who was opposed to this view and who leant toward a more Stoic position, points out that, if we draw the ultimate consequences from Aristotle's worldview, there appears to be a unified order of causes and effects in the universe, descending from some Unmoved Mover or First Cause. If we accept this picture of a concatenation of causes and effects throughout the universe, we are forced to rethink the role of chance and contingency.
Although certain events appear contingent to us, this is merely because we are unaware of the causes which determine them. In other words, we describe as “contingent” events which sometimes happen and sometimes do not.
Yet, when they do happen, they do so necessarily.
To assert our freewill would imply an exception to the necessary character of divine providence: freedom of choice clashes with the universal government exercised by the First Mover, a cause which is always identical to itself and whose effects are determined. Taking all its consequences into account, the philosophical system of the world seems to eliminate the indeterminacy required for us to be genuinely free, in our ethical deliberations, to choose between equally possible courses. Thus, our will is not a self-initiating principle, but rather a cause moved by a series of superior causes (of which we are at least partly unaware). Consequently, virtues and vices, along with the praise and blame which accompany them, are reduced to natural events, inscribed within the providential order of fate.
Having undermined the possibility of a philosophical foundation for human freedom, Pomponazzi now searches for a different foundation. He does this by analyzing the theories of previous thinkers, including Boethius, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, devoting many pages to detailed discussions of the scholastic doctrines of freedom, the will and the intellect (III, 1-10), the relationship between human freedom and divine providence (III,11-IV), and predestination (V) (see Pine 1973; 1986, 322-343; 1999; Scribano; Poppi 1988, 658-660; Ramberti, 75-84).
Among the many issues discussed in these lengthy books, two positions, which seem (at least provisionally) to have been endorsed by Pomponazzi, deserve to be highlighted.
In Book III, he maintains that, even though the intellect deliberates about the objects of volition and represents them to the will, it is the will which has the ultimate power to suspend an act of volition [cfr. Libet's 'not won't' and Aquinas nolition, willy-nilly -- will he, nill he, i.e., not to want a particular object.
Such a suspension apparently grants to the will a sort of negative freedom, which seems to escape the universal chain of necessity.
In Book IV, Pomponazzi tries to reconcile the indeterminacy demanded by free will with God's omniscience and omnipotence by drawing subtle distinctions, involving self-limitations on the part of God. Regarding divine omniscience (and, consequently, divine foreknowledge), he states that, according to several theologians, God foresees the future both as a completely actualized present and as a yet to be determined future.
This second mode of foreknowledge, mirroring the nature of time, seems to leave some space for human freedom. Even in the exercise of his omnipotence, God, in order to preserve the specific character of time, predetermines the future as undetermined and contingent; hence, there is a possibility of human freedom.
Despite these views, Pomponazzi's discussions in Books III-V do not provide a valid escape route from the philosophically based Determinism expounded in Books I-II.
It has been suggested that his real aim was to show how weak the premises of Christian faith were, in order to establish a theodicy compatible with human freedom (Scribano, 65-69). And, indeed, in the epilogue, Pomponazzi maintains that the Stoic doctrine of fate and freedom is “less contradictory,” since, according to it, all human souls are mortal and both good and evil are present in nature and in human affairs for the sake of a cosmic harmony (“pro decore universi”) which remains completely within the limits of physical reality and is ruled by divine fate (the Stoic God is the immanent principle of order in the universe, while the Christian God, though transcendent, good, merciful and all-powerful, is inexplicably unwilling to prevent evil and wrongdoing).
The final page of the treatise, however, echoes the conclusion of his Treatise on the Immortality of the Soul; for Pomponazzi admits that all philosophical demonstrations are provisional and liable to be mistaken in light of the truth taught by the Church, which condemns the Stoic doctrine on fate.
Modern scholars have taken different views of this treatise.
Some have argued that the deterministic stance of books I-II represents Pomponazzi's own position, which was intended to discredit Christian doctrine (Di Napoli 1973; Poppi 1988).
Others have stressed its inconclusive and aporetic character, describing it as a dramatic and irreconcilable confrontation between the Stoic and the Christian universe, between deterministic naturalism and human freedom (Pine 1986, 340-343), or noting its “failure to provide a theory of freedom, since all the traditional philosophical solutions had been undermined in the first part, while the truth of faith had lost its traditional philosophical and theological supports” (Ingegno 1977, 54).
Finally, it has also been suggested that a more unified reading of the work indicates that Pomponazzi was trying to elaborate a new form of determinism, modifying Aristotelian naturalism by giving it Stoic inflections and by borrowing elements from Averroism and from the Neoplatonism of Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite (Ramberti, 78-80).
According to this interpretation, which we subscribe to, if God limits himself by creating both a contingent future and a human faculty of acting in accordance with universal necessity (or of not acting at all), this amounts to a sort of freedom, since we can decide whether or not to attune our practical activities to the Intellect which reflects the order of reality (Ramberti, 80-81).
It has to be said that Pomponazzi does not entirely succeed in producing a coherent system which reconciles the demands of deterministic naturalism (in which all human faculties are necessitated by the interaction of physical causes) with the ethical requirement that human beings should strive to overcome naturally determined constraints by the pursuit of virtue -- but then...?
In his later university courses on Aristotle's biological works (1521-24), Pomponazzi continued to grapple with the same problems. When commenting on the Aristotelian statement that the nature of the blood affects the temperament of animals (De partibus animalium, II. 4, 651a12-13), he first recounts the Stoic position that the variety of temperaments and behaviors is exclusively determined by organic factors and contributes to the overall beauty of the universe.
He then presents the opposing Peripatetic position that the nature of the blood predisposes, but does not determine, character and temperament.
“A person who has an irascible temperament, but becomes gentle through the exercise of virtue, has greater merit than one who is naturally gentle; for virtue consists in facing difficulties, and God gave us the will to overcome our nature” (Pomponazzi 2004, II/13).