Journal of the History of Philosophy

Peter Olivi (c. 1248–98) was an original and controversial thinker whose philosophical ideas have aroused increasing interest within the scholarly community during the last [End Page 341] decades. Stève Bobillier's L'éthique de la personne is the first monograph-length study that focuses explicitly on his ethics. Bobillier's central claim is that Olivi approaches ethics from the point of view of an individual person who chooses her actions freely and with full awareness that the choices are up to her. When someone makes a morally wrong choice (e.g. due to akrasia), the choice can ultimately be traced back to the agent's free will. To chart the details of this theory, Bobillier analyzes Olivi's conception of the freedom of the will, self-consciousness, the notion of person, voluntary poverty, and the fall of Lucifer as a case study that illuminates human morality. Although many of these topics have been examined in earlier scholarly literature, Bobillier views them from the unifying perspective of Olivi's ethics and contextualizes them within earlier philosophical and theological discussions. This perspective makes the study more than the sum of its parts.

The study consists of five main chapters. Chapter 1 opens the work with a detailed examination of Olivi's theory of human will and its freedom, self-cognition, and moral conscience. Bobillier explains how Olivi's radical voluntarism is based on a complete autonomy of the will and its ability to choose between alternatives at any given time. He connects this radical freedom with Olivi's theory of self-cognition, arguing that these two are related to conscience, which is an ability to make judgments concerning the moral value of one's own actions. This places the moral agent at the heart of Olivi's ethics.

Chapter 2 analyzes Olivi's view of the moral agent in more detail by focusing on the notion of a person (persona) and its relation to human freedom. Bobillier shows that it brings together various elements from the domain of metaphysics, theology, and jurisprudence, contending that the most distinctive feature in Olivi's view is that the notion of a person encompasses two abilities that stem from the reflexivity of the human mind: self-cognition and the freedom of the will. The human mind is aware of itself, of its actions, and of itself as the subject of its actions; due to its freedom, it is the origin of its actions, and it is aware of being the origin. Thus, Olivi's ethics is based on a notion of a moral agent who is first and foremost an individual person—not in the modern sense of having a unique personality, but in the sense of being a per se existing subject who chooses her actions freely. Bobillier claims that this is an important step in the process that gave birth to the modern subject.

After these fundamentals, chapter 3 turns to ethics proper. This is the most important and original part of the work, as it develops in detail Bobillier's interpretation that personhood and self-reflexivity are central to Olivi's ethics: humans are autonomous individuals, intimately aware of themselves as moral agents who must judge the moral worth of their choices by themselves. They can reflect on their own (past, present, future) actions and know, via universal and innate moral conscience, whether these acts are morally good or evil. This entails that humans have access to the objective normative order, that is, the natural law/the will of God. But how does the knowledge of this normative order come about? Bobillier discusses several prominent candidates (such as synderesis, rectitude of the will, and prudence) and suggests that the notion of experiential "taste" (gustus)—which Olivi inherits from earlier theological literature—plays a crucial role. It is distinguished from detached theoretical knowledge, and it explains the...