If you don’t love nerding it up in medieval philosophy, you probably haven’t heard that late medieval philosophers like John Buridan, William of Ockham, and Marsilius of Padua were on the verge of inventing quantification, classical mechanics, and liberal democracy, but it all went pear-shaped because they were on the wrong side of the “Christ’s clothes” controversy.
This debate, which seemed much more important than all that other stuff at the time, was about whether Christ owned his clothing (and, therefore, whether the church should have private property). Franciscans like William and Marsilius thought no, their innovations in logic, physics, and political thought were declared heretical, William probably assassinated by agents of the pope, and between 2 to 7 centuries (depending on your tastes) of intellectual rot set in.
Superficially a historical crime thriller, the above is what this film is really about. Actually, the conventions of the crime genre are turned inside out: the detective, William Baskerville’s, reasoning leads him only into error, as he acknowledges (a reference to Holmes’s protestations that Watson’s memoirs record only the sensational cases, not the intellectually challenging ones). William’s failure to anticipate the solution of the crime is a manifestation of the still-born intellectual revolution of which he is part; he would have got it right if he’d been in a detective story taking place 700 years later!
The philosophical content? Well, there’s loads more of this type of stuff in the Umberto Eco novel on which it’s based, but the central puzzle is based on the use / mention distinction, or as it was known at the time, the distinction between material and personal supposition. The phrase “the second of four” can mean either the second of four things, and the second letter of the word “four”. It was a lot harder before the invention of inverted commas.
Philosophical themes: use / mention distinction
Random intellectual awesomeness: Christ’s clothes controversy
Filmic awesomeness: playful use of crime genre conventions
Until September 2016 I am a Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at Corpus Christi College and an Associate Professor in the Oxford Philosophy Faculty. From then on, I'll be a Senior Adviser at the New Zealand Ministry of Transport.
My intellectual interests are mainly in metaphysics, philosophy of language, and ethics, and of course transport policy.
