This book traces the historical roots of the cognitive sciences and examines pre-modern conceptualizations of the mind as presented and discussed in the tradition of commentaries on Aristotle's De anima from 1200 until 1650. It explores medieval and Renai.

The book documents thirty cases in which university-trained scholars were condemned for disseminating allegedly erroneous opinions in their teaching or writing.

This book is a collection of papers on the metaphysics and natural philosophy of John Buridan (ca. 1295-1361), one of the most innovative and influential ...

In this book, a dozen distinguished scholars in the field of the history of philosophy and science investigate aspects of the commentary tradition on Aristotle's De generatione et corruptione, one of the least studied among Aristotle's treatises in natural philosophy. Many famous thinkers such as Johannes Philoponus, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, John Buridan, Nicole Oresme, Francesco Piccolomini, Jacopo Zabarella, and Galileo Galilei wrote commentaries on it. The distinctive feature of the present book is that it approaches this commentary tradition (...) as a coherent whole, thereby ignoring the usual historiographical distinctions between the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the seventeenth century. Frans de Haas and Henk Kubbinga address the Greek commentary tradition on De generatione et corruptione. Simone van Riet's essay is devoted to the Latin version of Avicenna's third treatise of his Kitab al Shifa, which discusses Aristotle's De generatione et corruptione. James Otte traces the intricate history of the identification of the Latin translator of Aristotle's treatise as Burgundio of Pisa. The essay by John Murdoch explores the fortuna of atomistic arguments in the Latin commentary tradition. Jurgen Sarnowsky, Henk Braakhuis, and Stefano Caroti examine various themes in the commentaries that were produced by the so-called Buridan School, that is, John Buridan, Albert of Saxony, Nicholas Oresme, and Marsilius of Inghen. The article by Silvia Donati focuses on the influential commentary by the Expositor, Giles of Rome. The final essay, written by Anita Guerrini, tackles Robert Boyle's attitude in the Origin of Forms and Qualities toward such Aristotelian key concepts as forms, matter, qualities, and mixture. These essays are prefaced by a preliminary survey by Hans Thijssen of Aristotle's text, its Latin translations and its Greek, Arabic and Latin commentaries. (shrink)

J. M. M. H. Thijssen - Nicolas d'Autrécourt et la Faculté des Arts de Paris - Journal of the History of Philosophy 46:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 46.1 172-173 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Johannes M. M. H. Thijssen Radboud University Nijmegen Stefano Caroti and Christophe Grellard, editors. Nicolas d'Autrécourt et la Faculté des Arts de Paris . Quaderni di Paideia, 4. Cesena: Stilgraf Editrice, 2006. Pp. 329. e32.00. This book is a coherent (...) set of papers resulting from a conference organized by its editors, Stefano Caroti and Christophe Grellard. In the opening paper, William Courtenay rightly observes that the 1330s are an understudied period in the intellectual history of the University of Paris, especially with respect to its.. (shrink)

By way of conclusion we may add the following three items to A. Maier's and G. Federici-Vescovini's investigations: 1. The Questiones super libris Physicorum in the ms. Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VIII.5 have been incorrectly attributed to John Buridan. Their real author is Albert of Saxony. 2. The ms. Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VIII.5 ff. 4ra-4vb contains the Prologue and the tabula questionum of the Questions on De gen. et corr., whereas the ms. Vat. lat. 3097 ff. 103ra-146rb has the complete text. (...) This Prologue and the questions 1 and 3 can also be found in Vat. lat. 2185 ff. 50ra-50vb. This text certainly cannot be considered as another copy of Buridan's well known Questions on De gen. et corr. Neither is it certain that Nicole Oresme is their author, as A. Maier seems to believe. There are indications pointing in the direction of a redaction other than the one known, of Buridan's Questions. In any case this possibility cannot be ruled out by the material that has been presented here. 3. The ms. Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VIII.5 has at one time had the same owner as the codices Vat. lat. 2159, 2160, 2185 and 3066, and the codices Cesena, B. Malatestiana S.VII.5 and S.VIII.2. This owner was in all probability Bernardus a Campanea of Verona, a physician. (shrink)

After a brief sketch of the state of Buridan studies, this review article examines the recent study, by Benoît Patar, of a commentary on Aristotle’s Physics that is generally attributed to Albert of Saxony, but which Patar believes to have been authored by John Buridan. Patar is utterly convinced that the Bruges Quaestiones represent Buridan’s prima lectura, that is, his first course of lectures on the Physics, which preceded the two other redactions that are traditionally attributed to him. However, there (...) is no textual evidence in support of this assumption, but only speculative circumstantial evidence. The article therefore rejects Patar’s thesis as highly problematic. (shrink)

In this survey, I should like to present an overview of the scholarly literature that appeared during the last decade or so in the field of fourteenth-century natural philosophy. This survey is partial in both senses of the term: it is fragmentary, and occasionally, it records my disagreements with some of the scholarly literature. Before narrowing down its scope it might be well to raise two methodological problems which one encounters when attempting to deal with the history of late-medieval natural (...) philosophy of the sort with which this survey is concerned. First, the terminology of «natural philosophy», and second, the relation between natural philosophy and theology in the late Middle Ages. (shrink)

This book explores the dynamics of the commentary and textbook traditions in Aristotelian natural philosophy under the headings of doctrine, method, and scientific and social status. It enquires what the evolution of the Aristotelian commentary tradition can tell us about the character of natural philosophy as a pedagogical tool, as a scientific enterprise, and as a background to modern scientific thought. In a unique attempt to cut old-fashioned historiographic divisions, it brings together scholars of ancient, medieval, Renaissance and seventeenth-century philosophy. (...) The book covers a remarkably broad range of topics: it starts with the first Greek commentators and ends with Leibniz. (shrink)

Ibn Taymīyah, Aḥmad ibn ʻAbd al-Ḥalīm, 1263-1328. Naqḍ al-manṭiq; Islamic philosophy; logic.

This lecture is divided, roughly, into three parts. First, there is a general and perhaps rather simple-minded discussion of what are the ‘facts’ that social anthropologists study; is there anything special about these ‘facts’ which makes them different from other kinds of facts? It will be useful to start with the common-sense distinction between two kinds or, better, aspects of social facts; first—though neither is analytically prior to the other—and putting it very crudely, ‘what people do’, the aspect of social (...) interaction, and second, ‘what—and how—people think’, the conceptual, classifying, cognitive component of human culture. Now in reality, of course , these two aspects are inextricably intertwined. But it is essential to distinguish them analytically, because each aspect gives rise to quite different kinds of problems of understanding for the social anthropologist. We shall see that the problem of how to be ‘objective’, and so to avoid ethnographic error, arises in both contexts, but in rather different forms in each. (shrink)

In this contribution, I will develop a comprehensive tool for the reconstruction and evaluation of argumentation from expert opinion. This is done by analyzing and then combining two dialectical accounts of this type of argumentation. Walton’s account of the ‘appeal to expert opinion’ provides a number of useful, but fairly unsystematic suggestions for critical questions pertaining to argumentation from expert opinion. The pragma-dialectical account of ‘argumentation from authority’ offers a clear and systematic, but fairly general framework for the reconstruction and (...) evaluation of this type of argumentation. The tool is developed by incorporating Walton’s critical questions into a pragma-dialectical framework. (shrink)

The authors discuss some of the conceptual issues that must be considered in using and understanding psychiatric classification. DSM-IV is a practical and common sense nosology of psychiatric disorders that is intended to improve communication in clinical practice and in research studies. DSM-IV has no philosophic pretensions but does raise many philosphical questions. This paper describes the development of DSM-IV and the way in which it addresses a number of philosophic issues: nominalism vs. realism, epistemology in science, the mind/body dichotomy, (...) the definition of mental disorders, and dimensional vs. categorical classification. (shrink)

The practice of justifying scientific explanations generates argumentative patterns in which several types of arguments may play a role. This paper is aimed at identifying these patterns on the basis of an exploration of the institutional conventions regarding the nature, the shape and the quality of scientific explanations as reflected in the writings of influential philosophers of science. First, a basic pattern for justifying scientific explanations is described. Then, two types of extensions of this pattern are presented. These extensions are (...) derived from philosophical accounts of requirements for the quality of explanations and the choice of the best explanation from a number of candidate explanations respectively. The description of the second extension will make clear how pragmatic argumentation plays a role in argumentative patterns within the scientific domain. (shrink)