Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast, brought to you with the support of the philosophy department at King's College London and the LMU in Munich. Online at History of Philosophy.net. Today's episode,

Friends of the Truth, Arnold and Jansenism. Hands up, who remembers Thomas Bradwardine?

He was an archbishop we covered when looking at medieval philosophy.

If you do remember him, it will probably be because his name kept coming up in the context

of various debates of the 14th century. He anticipated later teachings on grace by insisting

on God's predestination, produced innovative writings about logic, including a solution to

the Liar's paradox,

and even got a mention in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales.

Today's subject, Antoine Arnold, has put me in mind of Bradwardine,

because like him, Arnold is not terribly famous, yet seems to be pervasive in the philosophical

literature of his time.

Like Bradwardine, he wrote on both philosophy and theology,

making important contributions in logic under the former heading, and in his theological writings,

developing a position on grace that Bradwardine might have found sympathetic.

He was also a man of the church, though he did not rise within the hierarchy as high as Bradwardine did. To the contrary,

he became the intellectual leader of a movement that was fiercely opposed by the mainstream

French church, Jansenism. As you can tell, Jansenism is not named after Anod. Even French

isn't that strange. Its namesake was Cornelius Jansen, a Dutch bishop who caused a stir in France

with a mammoth theological treatise tellingly called Augustinus. Jansenism took its inspiration

above all from St. Augustine and insisted on a rigorous teaching of divine grace. Their main rivals

were the Jesuits, to the point that one 17th century cardinal defined Jansenus as

Catholics who don't like Jesuits.

...