” 1 In this, he follows most medieval readers of Aristotle’s Physics, who knew that the Philosopher distinguishes sharply between natural things and artificial things, or things that lack any “innate impulse to change.” 2 For medieval Aristotelians, 3 natural things such as trees and dogs and humans are paradigmatic substances, each having a real essence and constituting something one per se, whereas artifacts such as brooms and beds and houses have only a per accidens unity, meaning that their formal structure has been imposed upon them by an external agent, the artisan, who reconfigures natural ‘raw’ materials into something that serves her own contingent purposes. 1285–1347) would have been a sleeping giant-denier too, for he bluntly asserts that there are no such things: “nothing in nature is naturally a statue. I kept thinking that I wasn’t looking at it the right way, but no matter how hard I squinted, it still looked to me like a rocky peninsula jutting out into Lake Superior, which is what it was (my mother finally ‘decoded’ the giant’s parts for me after I sheepishly admitted I couldn’t see it).Īs it turned out, as a graduate student reading medieval texts on natural philosophy some years later, I discovered I was not alone. The view was spectacular, to be sure, but it didn’t look to me at all like a giant, sleeping or otherwise. But it was difficult to contain my disappointment when I finally saw it.

I remember looking forward to seeing the Sleeping Giant for the first time with great anticipation, imagining it as some giant statue of a man.

One of their favorites was the famous ‘Sleeping Giant’ in Thunder Bay, Ontario: basically a rock formation along the southern tip of the Sibley Peninsula which, when seen from the city to the West, looks like a human figure lying on its back indeed, it was so identified in Ojibway legend, well before Europeans arrived in the area. So my parents enlivened the trip with sightseeing along the way. Needless to say, the journey there and back also seemed endless, especially to us kids.

In any case, there are no such things as natural statues, any more than there could be substances created by human artifice.Įvery summer when I was a boy, my mother and father would pack us into the car at our home in Ontario and we would make a long journey west, to Saskatchewan, to visit my grandparents and enjoy several weeks under the endless prairie skies. Ockham does not think that a new thing is thereby created, although his emphasis on the contribution of human artisans seems to leave questions about the ontological status of their agency open. For Ockham, artifacts are essentially rearrangements, via human agency, of already existing things, like the clay shaped by a sculptor into a statue or the stick and bristles and string one might fashion into a broom. Rather, he understands artifacts as per accidens composites of parts that differ, but not so much that only divine power could unite them, as in the matter and form of a proper substance. Thus, in contrast to his predecessors, Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, he denies that artifacts become such by means of an advening ‘artificial form’ or ‘form of the whole’ or any change that might tempt us to say that we are dealing with a new thing ( res).

Among medieval Aristotelians, William of Ockham defends a minimalist account of artifacts, assigning to statues and houses and beds a unity that is merely spatial or locational rather than metaphysical.

According to william of ockham