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Knowledge, Mental Language, and Free Will (Volume 3
Knowledge, Mental Language, and Free Will traverses the medieval philosophical landscape of metaphysics, logic and natural philosophy. Alexander W. Hall discusses Thomas Aquinas’s interpretation of Aristotle’s doctrine of per se predication as it occurs in the conclusion of scientific demonstrations, i.e., of arguments producing scientific knowledge in the strict sense. Henrik Lagerlund and Catarina Dutilh Novaes take up medieval studies of mental language in the writings of Peter of Ailly and William Ockham. Works in this genre seek to discern what concepts are concepts of, the ontological status of concepts as entities, and how concepts stand for and represent things in the world. Lastly, Walter Redmond comments on and translates the prologue to and first chapter of the Mexican Jesuit Father Matías Blanco’s (d. 1734) The Three-Stranded Cord [Funiculus triplex], where Blanco treats the antinomy between freedom and determination, modal semantics, tense logic and the logical status of counterfactuals in an attempt to reconcile human freedom with God’s causality and omniscience.
Mental Representation (Volume 4
It is supposed to be common knowledge in the history of ideas that one of the few medieval philosophical contributions preserved in modern philosophical thought is the idea that mental phenomena are distinguished from physical phenomena by their intentionality, their directedness toward some object. As is usually the case with such commonplaces about the history of ideas, especially those concerning medieval ideas, this claim is not quite true. Medieval philosophers routinely described ordinary physical phenomena, such as reflections in mirrors or sounds in the air, as exhibiting intentionality, while they described what modern philosophers would take to be typically mental phenomena, such a...
Medieval Skepticism, and the Claim to Metaphysical Knowledge (Volume 6
Medieval Skepticism, and the Claim to Metaphysical Knowledge presents three sets of essays. The first is an exchange between Antoine Côté and Charles Bolyard over Siger of Brabant’s strategy to silence the skeptic by discriminating between nobler and lesser senses and grounding certitude in sense perceptions. Second is another scholarly exchange, between Rondo Keele and Jack Zupko, over what Keele describes as Walter Chatton’s attempt to discredit Ockhamist nominalism by means of both an ‘anti-razor’, employed by Chatton to prescribe ontological commitment, and an argument strategy based on iteration and infinite regress. The last group of essays explores issues that develop out of...
The Immateriality of the Human Mind, the Semantics of Analogy, and the Conceivability of God (Volume 1
The Immateriality of the Human Mind, the Semantics of Analogy, and the Conceivability of God brings together the work of experts in the field of medieval philosophy to consider the nature of God and the soul, what can be known of the divine essence and the semantics of theological discourse from the perspectives of medieval theology (both natural and revealed), logic and natural philosophy. In his capacity as an arts master commenting on a work of natural philosophy, Aristotle’s De Anima, John Buridan discusses the immateriality of the intellect against the background of the competing, mutually exclusive views of Alexander of Aphrodisias and Averroes. Aquinas takes up the same issue, but i...
The Demonic Temptations of Medieval Nominalism (Volume 9
This volume presents three sets of papers discussing the medieval problem of singular cognition, nominalist epistemology, and the metaphysics of the great medieval nominalist philosopher, John Buridan. The first group of essays concerns issues surrounding the possibility of singular cognition in light of the cognitive psychology of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, as well as the latter’s “argument from indifference” as developed by William Ockham to support his own, nominalist epistemology. However, Ockham’s epistemology, worked out in detail by John Buridan, seems to have implications concerning the possibility of “Demon Skepticism” (later popularized by Descartes), which in turn poses a threat to the consistency of the nominalist cognitive psychology in general, as discussed in the second group of essays. Finally, the third group of essays explores some intriguing, but “weird” implications of the nominalist approach to epistemology in the metaphysics of John Buridan.
The Metaphysics of Personal Identity
One of the most debated topics in medieval philosophy was the metaphysics of identity—that is, what accounts for the distinctness (non-identity) of different individuals of the same, specific kind and the persistence (self-identity) of the same individuals over time and in different possible situations, especially with regard to individuals of our specific kind, namely, human persons. The first three papers of this volume investigate the comparative development of positions. One problem, considered by William of Auvergne and Albert the Great, deals with Aristotle’s doctrine of the active intellect and its relation to Christian philosophical conceptions of personhood. A larger set of issues on the nature and post-mortem fate of human beings is highlighted as common inquiry among Muslim philosophers and Thomas Aquinas, as well as Aquinas and the modern thinker John Locke. Finally, the last two papers offer a debate over Aquinas’s exact views regarding whether substances persist identically across metaphysical “gaps” (periods of non-existence), either by nature or divine power.
