UEB INMOBILIARIA CENTRAL MINTUR

For some reason it has been the fashion among some historians to minimize the impact of the Magyars, who ‘were not a creative factor in the West’. (All this means is that the Magyars did not reach Cambridge.)403

i. The Cambridge Theory of Action

Here I will effectively try to reverse the logic of David-Hillel Ruben’s ‘Cambridge Theory of Action’ to show how it can be turned into a theory of historical action. Not only will this deepen the account of historical action I have offered already, it will also provide some fairly precise diagrams which will be of exegetical use when we return to

Montaillou. With this goal in mind, we need to begin by paying attention to how Ruben’s theory itself functions – or does not – on its own terms. In the Cambridge Theory, which Ruben proposed in Action and Its Explanation, the problem of posthumous predication is tackled with reference to the concept of a Cambridge Change.404 _{Posthumous predication involves cases where new properties can be}

predicated of someone or their action after death – or after the relevant action has ceased. A famous example of this is Aristotle’s idea at the beginning of the

Nichomachean Ethics that there may be a sensible question ‘should no man be called

403 _{Davies 1997: 316. Davies is quoting CW Previté-Orton’s contribution to the Shorter Cambridge} Medieval History, published in 1952 – which hints that his sense of ‘fashion’ might not be quite à la mode.

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happy until he is dead?’.405 _{Aristotle also asks whether the fortunes of the living can}

affect the dead.406

The most intuitive interpretation of Aristotle’s question is that it asks about the conditions under which descriptions can be offered of a person’s life.407 _{It is not that}

we think that happiness itself is something which relies on a state of death, but that we need to see a full life before we can judge, in retrospect, that it was fully happy in a rich, Greek sense. If a man is still alive, there is a chance that the final years of his life will be marred by some misfortune. Perhaps his shed blows over or all his sheep die in a storm. What looks like a happy life while it is still being lived may turn out to be only incompletely happy, though it is a separate question as to whether one’s shed’s

destruction could completely wipe out the putative happiness of yesteryear.

The idea of Cambridge Change, which Ruben wants to put in contact with puzzles about posthumous predication, was originally proposed by Peter Geach: if something x

changes in a Cambridge way, it changes purely in terms of its relations.408 _{Other things}

to which x is related change, so the relations between x and these other things change. Change is ordinarily construed as a change in the properties which can be predicated of some individual. Some properties are relational; so sometimes when a relevant relation changes (where x is one of the relata), this changes the relational properties of x. The relation, and thus the relational properties of x, can change in virtue of one of the relata, which is not x, changing.

For example: I might be so many millions of kilometres from our sun at lunchtime but further away by the time I am in bed at midnight. The change in my properties from

405 _{See Aristotle 1998: I.9-10} 406 _{Aristotle 1998: I.11} 407 _{Cf. Solomon 1976} 408 _{See Geach 1981: 318-323}

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being so many thousands of kilometres away from the sun at one time to being so many more thousands of kilometres away at another has nothing, let us say, to do with

movements I make myself. Imagine that I have been writing all day and that my desk is directly below my bed. Nevertheless, in my relative physical inaction – to say nothing of my literary productivity – something has happened to the relations between my body and the sun in such a way as to effect the properties which can be predicated of me. According to Geach’s idea of Cambridge change, my properties have changed without, or rather irrespective of, any real change in me. Nevertheless, my properties have changed, because my properties depend at least in part on my relations with other things. Ruben uses this idea to make sense of his idea that for any given basic bodily movement I perform, such as bending my finger, the number of actions I perform may be very large. He calls himself a ‘prolific theorist’ by contrast to his opponent the ‘austere theorist’ because he thinks that more than one of the many ways in which we can describe my basically bodily movements count genuinely as different actions of mine (and therefore different events). The austere theorist, on the contrary, would say we have but one action and many descriptions.

Ruben’s first example is killing the queen, which I elaborate slightly: I bend my finger, I pull the trigger of a gun, I hit my target (the queen) with the bullet of my gun, I rupture her right lung. But then: initially she survives, she travels to Balmoral to recuperate. She rests for six months but then dies at 12 o’clock on the 17th _{of November: I have}

killed the queen. I am not in Balmoral. I may not even have survived as long as she has. When did I kill the queen? Where? Could it be that I was not present when I killed her, if the killing was in Balmoral on the 17th _{of November, when I was dead myself or}

when I was in hiding in Patagonia?

The puzzles this example raises are about how many events we are to count and the extent of my action and the descriptions we can give of it. Ruben argues that the death