Causality plays an important role in medieval philosophical writing: even before the rediscovery of Aristotle's major works, the created universe was seen as a rational manifestation of God's action. In the later Middle Ages, the dominant genre of medieval academic writing was the commentary on an authoritative work: Aristotle's Physics and Metaphysics were frequently commented on, and both contain a great deal of material on causation. So the nature of the philosophical and theological themes which were popular in the Middle (...) Ages led to an emphasis on causality. Writers studied the interrelationship of divine grace and natural processes, the role of the will in ethics, free will and determinism: all of these problems have an important causal component. (shrink)

The idea that intentionality is the distinctive mark of the mental or that only mental phenomena have intentionality emerged in the philosophical tradition after Franz Brentano. Much of contemporary philosophy is dedicated to a rejection of the view that mental phenomena have original intentionality. In other words, main strands of contemporary philosophy seek to naturalize intentionality of the mental by tracing it to linguistic intentionality. So in order to avoid the problematic claim that a physical phenomenon can in virtue of (...) its own physical structure mean exactly one thing, they adopt a form of holism. Nevertheless, contemporary philosophers are attracted to a naturalist story about the emergence of the logical space. In this work, I am interested in the naturalism and the holism advocated by Wilfrid Sellars and developed by the Pittsburgh school. It is not only a view that I find theoretically attractive but I also admire it for its fecund engagement with the history of philosophy, especially the work of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and, as I will argue, Abū Nas̩r Muḥammad al-Fārābī (Alfarabi). (shrink)

This thesis addresses three challenges posed by intentionality - the ability of our mental states and language to be about something - to a logician: an apparent reference to non-existent objects, intentional indeterminacy and the failure of substitutivity of coextensive terms in an intentional context. Since intentionality plays an important role in our everyday reasoning, a proper formal account of it is highly desirable, yet it requires a departure from classical logic. One can modify classical logic and adapt the formal (...) apparatus to account for the aforementioned problems (Graham Priest’s logic for intentionality serves as an example of such an approach in this work) or one can make an even more radical shift and seek for inspiration in a different logical tradition like the terminist logic developed in the Late Middle Ages by figures like William of Ockham or John Buridan. The second path is explored here as a modest attempt to show that once we abandon the bias against the history of logic as irrelevant, we can actually get access to firm logical solutions inaccessible from a classical perspective, while still practising logic proper. (shrink)