The seventeenth century was a period of extraordinary invention, discovery and revolutions in scientific, social and political orders. It was a time of expansive automation, biological discovery, rapid advances in medical knowledge, of animal trials and a questioning of the boundaries between species, human and non-human, between social classes, and of the assumed naturalness of political inequality. This book gives a tour through those objects, ordinary and extraordinary, which captivated the philosophical imagination of the single most important French philosopher of (...) this period, Rene Descartes. Deborah J. Brown and Calvin G. Normore document Descartes' attempt to make sense of the complex, composite objects of human and divine invention, consistent with the fundamental tenets of his metaphysical system. Their central argument is that, far from reducing all the categories of ordinary experience to the two basic categories of substance, mind and body, Descartes' philosophy recognises irreducible composites that resist reduction, and require their own distinctive modes of explanation. (shrink)

This chapter traces some of the ancient and medieval history of the debate about whether there are distinct and potentially conflicting true goods or genuine tension between the pursuit of self-interest and the pursuit of what has intrinsic value. Much modern moral theory posits that morally good agents are prepared to restrain the pursuit of even their enlightened self-interest when it conflicts with what is intrinsically good or is good for others. This puts Morality at odds with a long Ethical (...) tradition that is especially indebted to Aristotle and his followers and that proposes the ultimate aim of any rational agent to be that agent’s flourishing or happiness. The chapter concludes, pace Elizabeth Anscombe and Alasdair MacIntyre, that while the view embedded in much modern moral theory reached its full development in the context of a theologically infused medieval tradition, which involved Anselm of Canterbury, Peter Abelard and John Duns Scotus, its roots are earlier, and its metaphysical underpinnings are independent of that context. (shrink)

What are the methodological consequences of the fact that Philosophy has a history and that Philosophy incorporates the products of the history of Philosophy into its current practice? Is an internal ‘philosophical’ history of Philosophy possible and desirable or is the history of Philosophy best approached as a branch of Intellectual History and/or Cultural History. This chapter first sketches some of the history of the study of philosophy’s past and contrasts some widely employed ‘doxological’, ‘anthropological’, and sociological approaches to that (...) study with the approaches employed in a particular, historically recent discipline, History of Philosophy. It argues that History of Philosophy has a distinctive methodological structure which poises it interestingly between the disciplines of History and Philosophy and which can be usefully compared with, but is quite distinct from, that of the History of Science. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 53, Issue 2-4, pp 353 - 371 While agreeing with Professor D’Ors’ thesis that the notion of logical consequence cannot be exhaustively characterized, I depart from Professor d’Ors’ conclusion that the very notion of good consequence is primitive and can only be identified with the set of acceptable rules of inference, and from his conviction that modal notions such as necessity and impossibility are equivocal and gain such clarity as they have by their interaction with rules of (...) inference. Inspired by this picture, Professor d’Ors undertook an examination of a number of medieval attempts to analyze the notion of consequence and tried to show how certain developments in the medieval history of logic made sense in the light of debate over such analyses. This paper examines a small fragment of Professor d’Ors programme and its relation to some aspects of Jean Buridan’s account of the consequence relation. (shrink)

For nearly four centuries Peter of Spain's influential Summaries of Logic was the basis for teaching logic; few university texts were read by more people. This new translation presents the Latin and English on facing pages, and comes with an extensive introduction, chapter-by-chapter analysis, notes, and a full bibliography.

Three philosophical questions that are often confused should instead be keep distinct: First, what is a thought? Second, what is that in virtue of which a thought is a thought? Third, what is it that determines of what a thought is a thought? These questions raise very different issues within Ockham’s philosophy. Although Ockham’s views about the first question evolve, he seems to answer the second and the third questions in the same way, maintaining throughout his career that the intentionality (...) of thoughts, which he expresses in terms of signification, is a primitive feature of them. Ockham’s view contrasts sharply with the view that can be found in Aquinas and others that a thought is a form of being present in an immaterial way. This alternative view explains intentionality by reducing it to the co-presence of a number of non-cognitive factors. This latter view offers hope of unifying epistemology and such sciences as optics but at the price of a very peculiar ontology. Ockham avoids this peculiarity, but his way of doing so raises issues about what determines the taxonomy of thoughts, and about whether the items which are thoughts are essentially so or whether by God’s power they could exist without being thoughts. Despite Ockham’s terminology of similitude, the taxonomy of thoughts is not fixed by internal features of the metaphysical items which are thoughts but by the objects of the thoughts, and this suggests a negative answer to the questions whether thoughts are essentially thoughts, an answer that Ockham seems not to draw explicitly but which is explicit in the work of some, like Pierre d’Ailly, who are much influenced by him. (shrink)

William Ockham and John Wyclif develop strikingly different accounts of the Eucharist in the light of strikingly different metaphysical assumptions. Ockham assumes that God can create or annihilate any other actual being without creating or destroying anything not a part of it and so that God can annihilate a substance while preserving its real accidents. Wyclif supposes that to annihilate a being is to annihilate not only its accidents but everything in its Porphyrian tree. Ockham takes being to be univocal, (...) Wyclif allows that there might be distinct ways of being. Both attempt to negotiate difficult terrain between their metaphysics and the theological orthodoxy of their time but with quite different results. While Ockham admits that consubstantiation (the co-presence of the bread and wine and the body and blood of Christ) is the most rationally defensible of the alternative accounts of the Eucharist available to him, he strives to develop an account both consistent with his metaphysics and with a plausible understanding of transubstantiation. Wyclif begins with a similar project but in the end concludes that consubstantiation is the best account of the Eucharist. (shrink)

Because the History of Philosophy is a branch of both History and Philosophy, it faces tasks which are Historical, tasks which are Philosophical, and tasks which overlap both. As Philosophy typically flourishes by incorporating and assimilating ideas and bodies of text which have either not previously been part of its stock in trade or have been forgotten, the main task facing the History of Philosophy today is that of developing serious scholarship in areas that have been largely neglected, such as (...) Philosophy in Arabic and Persian as well as in Sanskrit and Chinese. (shrink)

Gyula Klima has argued that the disagreements between Nominalists and Realists in the middle ages, as exemplified in the views of John Buridan and Thomas Aquinas, centered less in semantics and metaphysics than in epistemology and philosophy of mind. This paper suggests that in the light of Prof. Klima’s arguments, the disagreements in these areas cannot easily be separated and raise a number of issues that remain of philosophical importance.

Prof. Pasnau’s remarkable book offers an exciting integration of medieval and early modern philosophy. It begins, however, in mediis rebus and so downplays the role that a particularly Nominalist tradition plays in explaining the abandonment of substantial form rise of the mechanical philosophy. This paper attempts to sketch some of that role.

This book offers a selection of 13 case studies on how the notion of grounding helps illuminate philosophical discussions of our past with a special focus on debates of the Middle Ages. It thereby makes not only the case that the notion of grounding, which has become so widely debated in analytic metaphysics, has a long and venerable tradition, but also shows that this tradition has a lot to teach to contemporary philosophers of grounding. This is because the historical authors (...) discussed in this volume – that is, Aristotle, Fazang, Boethius, Avicenna, Abelard, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Buridan, Suárez, Leibniz, and others – suggested different types of non-efficient-causal explanations which are to be carefully distinguished. This volume illustrates how philosophy and history of philosophy can be mutually illuminating by showing that the terminology developed in the contemporary debate about grounding can help reconstruct philosophical discussions from Antiquity up to the Early Modern Period, and that these very discussions enrich, and in part challenge the contemporary debate about grounding. In this vein, it is an important reading for everyone interested in the history of grounding and the philosophical insights that this history might have left to us. (shrink)

It is often said that an argument is valid if and only if it is impossible for its premises to be jointly true and its conclusion false. Usually there is little harm in saying this but it places the concept of truth at the very heart of logic and, given how complex and obscure that concept is, one might wonder if trouble arises from this.It does — in at least two contexts. One of these was explored in the first half (...) of the fourteenth century by Jean Buridan and by the mysterious figure known as the Pseudo-Scotus of the Questions on the Prior Analytics printed in the edition of Scotus's works edited by Luke Wadding. Buridan thought that the bearers of truth were particular sentence-tokens; he thought of truth as a .. (shrink)

In the last half of the twentieth century, some of the most prominent historians of Philosophy turned their attention to the historiography of the subject. Arguably the most important and most infl...

Review article of Tobias Hoffmann, Free Will and the Rebel Angels in Medieval Philosophy, Cambridge 2021.

This is a marvelous book, a “must read’ for anyone interested in understanding the philosophical debates of the later Middle Ages and a useful book for contemporary philosophers who will find in it a sophisticated articulation of a philosophical position well able to provide perspective on a number of contemporary debates. It is exceptionally well-written, clear, and insightful.We are now in a fairly good position to understand Buridan’s role in later medieval philosophy, his general philosophical orientation, and the milieu in (...) which he worked. What we have lacked is a detailed study of the core of his philosophy, and it is this gap that Gyula Klima’s book splendidly fills—just as our picture of Buridan’s thought is coming into focus. Much of Buridan’s work is either unedited or exists only in incunabula, and there are underway editing projects of central texts that will shed considerable new light on the man and his work. We are fortunate, however, to have already a splendid English translation of and commentary on Buridan’s massive and rich Summulae de dialectica by Klima himself, and this, together with incunabula and with recent editions of some of his other logical works, forms a sufficient basis of text for reasonable confidence that Klima’s. (shrink)