Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy

A história humana possui seus processos e especificidades no e do tempo e espaço, com certas rupturas e continuidades de certos processos e elementos. Podemos citar como exemplo: Os tipos e modos de desigualdades, sistemas escravistas e sistemas coloniais etc. Mas, não sendo igual ou da mesma forma. Há especificidades e características ligadas ao tempo e ao espaço contextual. Porém, sem dúvidas, há acontecimentos e fatos históricos que ocorrem com certas semelhanças e características entre passado e presente, ainda que dentro (...) dos seus respectivos contextos. Logo, a cada época e contexto social, político, econômico, cultural, religioso e histórico, podemos observar certas semelhanças, entre ‘o ontem e o hoje. ’ A exemplo, o Sistema Feudal que ocorreu em muitos continentes e países, e em tempos específicos e com suas especificidades contextuais. Desse modo, como já mencionado, parecem que certos elementos ou resquícios de fatos históricos anteriores ou passados se evidenciam em outras épocas e contextos. Não que sejam os mesmos sistemas, nem tampouco a continuidade deles, mas apenas semelhanças e características que parecem ‘ir e vir. ’ Diante de tais fatos, seus problemas e consequências; debruçamo-nos em fontes sobre o Sistema Feudal Europeu dos séc. X ao XIV d. C. para compreendermos elementos, eventos e episódios que vêm ocorrendo na contemporaneidade brasileira, com algumas semelhanças com o Sistema Feudal. Fundamentalmente, no que diz respeito às terras, grandes latifundiários, religião, política, economia e rituais. Assim, identificamos que: a) Religião, Política e ‘poder’, tanto no feudalismo quanto nas relações políticas atuais no Brasil, continuam na perspectiva de defender a propriedade privada de grandes extensões de terras nas mãos de poucos; b) manter e reproduzir as ideias conservadoras e ‘moralistas’ dos grupos que detém o ‘poder político e econômico’; e c) naturalizar a pobreza e a miséria da população como destino ou normal-natural, bem como atribuir às conquistas econômicas e materiais dos grandes latifundiários a algo divino ou determinado. (shrink)

Jean-Luc Marion has long endeavored to broaden our view of truth. In this illuminating new book--his deepest engagement with theology to date--Marion proposes a rigorous new understanding of human and divine revelation in a deeply phenomenological key. Although today considered the central theme of theology, the concept of Revelation was almost entirely unknown to the first millennium of Christian thought. In a penetrating historical deconstruction Marion traces the development of this term to the rise of metaphysics from Aquinas through Descartes, (...) Suárez, and Kant; formalized into an epistemological framework, this understanding of Revelation has restricted philosophical and theological thinking ever since. To break free from these limits, Marion takes hints from theologians including Balthasar and Barth while mobilizing the phenomenology of givenness to provide a rigorous new understanding of revelation as a mode of uncovering. His extensive study of the Jewish and Christian Scriptures unfolds a logic of Trinitarian phenomenality, worked out in conversation with Augustine, Basil, Hegel, Schelling, and others, that ultimately transforms our very notions of being and time. The result is precisely what we have come to expect from this acclaimed philosopher: masterful historical scholarship working in tandem with daring originality. (shrink)

In Inferno’s XXVII Canto, Dante meets Guido da Montefeltro. His story is related to a crucial dilemma. Asked by Boniface VIIIth to give a fraudulent advice for conquering Palestrina, with the promise of a pre-emptively forgiveness of his sin, Guido faces a conflict between two acts of the will: to want x (to give the advice) and to repent wanting x, one of which (repentance) will be not produced by Guido’s will but rather imposed by an external source. So Guido (...) wants to do and not to do x at the same time, even if he knows that the best choice is not doing x: a logical contradiction that defines what seems to be a particular case of weakness of will (akrasia). The paper analyzes this case within the framework of akrasia as reading key, making use, for his conceptual definition, of the tools employed in Saarinen’s, Davidson’s and Elster’s studies. (shrink)

For many areas of philosophy, we lack an understanding of their developments between the fourteenth and seventeenth centuries. One such area is the development of the notion of final causation. The rejection of final causation is often described as one of the distinguishing hallmarks of so called Early Modern philosophy in relation to the Scholastic philosophical tradition. Our lack of understanding of the development of this notion in philosophy therefore impedes our ability to write an adequate history of philosophy spanning (...) these centuries. In this article, the notion of final causation as treated in the works of Chrysostom Javellus (1472–1538) and Francis Silvestri (of Ferrara) (1474–1526) is presented. It is argued that the treatment of final causation in these thinkers is already shaped by concerns regarding finality that we find in Early Modern philosophy. (shrink)

The Destructions of the Modes of Signifying (henceforth: dms) is an anonymous fourteenth-century polemic against modist speculative grammar (grammatica speculativa). Wielding Ockhamist logic and metaphysics, the dms repeatedly attacks the very root of modism: the claim that the grammatical features of language are grounded in the metaphysical properties of the world. I call this the Modist Correspondence Thesis (henceforth: mct). In its most general form, mct says that every mode of signifying exhibited by an utterance corresponds to a mode of (...) being exhibited by a thing. The Emptiness Argument of the dms tries to show that mct fails to accommodate certain special cases, such as privative, fictitious, and divine utterances, like ‘blindness’ (caecitas), ‘chimera’ (chimaera), and ‘deity’ (deitas). The modist Thomas of Erfurt directly addresses the Emptiness Argument, anticipating the anti-modist criticisms present in the dms. In doing so, he points the way to alternative formulations of mct that are immune to those criticisms. (shrink)

The ontological status of esse cognitum was at the center of complex debates throughout the Scotist tradition (Alnwick vs. Aesculo, Mastri vs. Punch). This article investigates the Scotist Angelo Volpe’s discussion of esse cognitum enjoyed by possible creatures in the divine intellect. Volpe responds to two religious warnings, one against assuming any eternal real being for merely possible creatures, and a second against depriving God’s eternal knowledge of a corresponding object, since that would endanger this knowledge itself. Volpe opts for (...) a solution that allows possible creatures the status of beings of reason (entia rationis) due to their own ontological merit, and the status of real beings (entia realia) due to God’s knowing that they as possibles are not in opposition to real existence. He rejects the view that esse cognitum is a kind of being that holds a middle position between real being and being of reason. Volpe’s historical significance is emphasized. (shrink)

Finitude’s Wounded Praise: Responses to Jean-Louis Chrétien, eds. Philip Gonzalez and Joseph McMeans, pp. 3-25:.

Review of Andreas Kablitz’s Poetics of Redemption: Dante’s Divine Comedy. Renaissance Quarterly 76 (2024):1566-1568.

Mystical Theology and Platonism in the Time of Cusanus engages with the history of mystical theology and Neoplatonic philosophy through the lens of the 15th century philosopher and theologian, Nicholas of Cusa. The volume comprises nineteen essays that break down the barriers between medieval and Renaissance studies, reinterpreting Cusanus’ place in the history of thought by exploring the archive that informed his thinking, while also interrogating his works by exploring them from the standpoint of their later reception by modern philosophers (...) and theologians. The volume also offers tribute to the career of Donald F. Duclow, a leading scholar in the field of Cusanus studies in particular and of the history of mystical theology and Neoplatonic philosophy more generally. (shrink)

In the Commentary on the Metaphysics, Albert the Great (d. 1280) envisages the possibility that the human intellect relates to the highest realities not only as the eyes of the bat see the light of day (analogy used by Aristotle at the beginning of the second book of the Metaphysics) but also – thanks to study and gradually, already in this life – as the eyes of the eagle see the circle of the Sun. In the Summa theologiae, discussing the (...) same Aristotelian passage, Albert the Great replaces the eagle with the herodius (“golden eagle”, i.e. the eagle having supreme vision for Albert). The paper analyzes the meaning of this variation in Albertine ornithology, examining other passages of his works in which the herodius is mentioned and evaluating whether this is a sheer case of substitution of a species (the eagle) with one of its subspecies (the herodius) with the same meaning and function, or a subtle distinction between two different cognitive abilities required respectively by metaphysics and theology to know their objects of investigation. (shrink)

After a methodological premise defining the state of the art as regards the relationship between Albert the Great and the Magistri Artium tradition on De anima, this article examines the second part of De unitate intellectus (ed. Coloniensis 1975), in which Albert expounds the rationes in contrarium to the thesis of the unicity of the intellect. In parallel, an analysis is conducted of the Sed contra section of q. 77 (membr. III), tract. XIII, pars II, of the Summa Theologiae (ed. (...) Borgnet 1895). Beginning with an examination of the formal structure of these sections from the two works and a detailed survey of some of the rationes laid out therein, the article highlights both the aspects common to the two redactions and those which most distinguish them, so as to formulate some hypotheses regarding the reasons and methods behind this reworking carried out by Albert. (shrink)

This essay is devoted to Albert the Great’s theoretical treatment of fatherhood and motherhood, male and female genders, in the generation of the vegetabilia. While animals reproduce by the mating of female and male individuals, plants do not display a sexual distinction through a male and female configuration. Moreover, in the generation of plants, the maternal and paternal functions are not performed by individuals of the same species as what is generated. To fulfill the generative process, plants require the external (...) agency of the Sun and the ground, traditionally deemed as “pater et mater plantarum”. The question of the generation of plants is dealt with at length in Albert’s De vegetabilibus et plantis, where he gives an extensive treatment of plants’ life modeled after the epistemology of Aristotle’s works on animals. This theoretical approach is not confined to Albert’s natural philosophical works but extends also to his theological investigation. By adopting an interdisciplinary standpoint, this essay will show how Albert progressively develops an explicative model for plants generation that, through the comparison with animal generation, aims at identifying the respective domains of matter and form, fatherhood and motherhood, male and female genders, also in the generation of plants. (shrink)

Albert the Great’s theological and exegetical-biblical works often reshape naturalphilosophical doctrines derived from his earlier Aristotelian paraphrases. Accordingly, Albert’s caveats, distinguishing the treatment of topics in physicis and in theologicis, are not abstract disciplinary borderlines but point out to his Dominican students that he will return to crucial matters of the peripatetic paraphrases, recontextualizing them in later works. This article illustrates such interdisciplinary dynamics by analyzing Albert’s commentary on Gen., 1, 20-23, the fifth day of creation, as discussed in STh., (...) II, xi, 60. Albert questions the seeming asymmetry arising from a single element, water, giving rise to two different outcomes: birds for the sublunar sky and reptiles for the earth. The arguments put forth by opponents and Albert’s solution draw upon earlier natural-philosophical works of his, namely De animalibus, De vegetabilibus, and De sensu et sensatu. Notably, Albert reuses his doctrine of humiditates in living bodies and generative processes (such as humidum seminale, humidum vaporativum, humidum spirans, humidum manens). Additionally, Albert analyzes the processes of subtiliatio and digestio, which transform siccum terreum into the matter required for the formation of animate bodies. (shrink)

This paper’s focus is about some questions concerning the ontology of the angel and the theory of knowledge. About ontology, the main problems discussed by Albert are the metaphysical composition (despite its immateriality) of the angel, the nature of angel’s individuality and the angel’s relationship with the separate intelligences. On this last point Albert, unlike Thomas, argues that angels and intelligences are distinct entities and that the identification between them would be a denial of angel’s ministerial function. In order to (...) accomplish this function, angels must know not only God’s essence, the first object of their contemplation, but also particular things and events of human lives. This is one of the reasons why Albert considers the mind of the angel through a close comparison with the characteristics of the divine mind on the one hand, and with the human mind on the other. The angel, unlike man, is an immaterial entity, devoid of sense organs: in the terms of Aristotelian gnoseology valid for man, it is not clear how angel can know particular things. In order to resolve this difficulty, Albert hints at a cognitive mechanism per applicationem of the innate form of the thing. The angelic mind therefore appears to Albert as characterized, unlike God, by only habitual knowledge of things, which becomes in actu only after a “contact” with the things themselves. (shrink)

The anonymous Declaratio on the Elementatio theologica of Proclus transmitted in MS Vat. lat. 4567 is the last of the three professed commentaries on the text extant in Latin to receive a critical edition. The commentary is not only a paraphrase of Proclus’ own remarks on 210 of the original 211 propositions, but frequently provides additional arguments and clarifications. Its author is clearly influenced by the Liber de causis and aims to compare the metaphysics of Aristotle and Proclus. The introduction (...) to the following edition compares the methods of the Declaratio to the other two Latin commentaries on the Elementatio theologica and considers a few clues that may shed light on the identity and aims of its author. (shrink)

In this paper, I seek to shed light on some main interpretative aspects of George Pachymeres’ Commentary on Plato’s Parmenides. This Commentary –the only Byzantine Commentary on a platonic work ever to have been hitherto discovered– displays a unique specificity, since it marks a decisive turning point in the traditional interpretation of dialogues of Plato as an authority in terms of metaphysics or of philosophy in general. Not only does the Byzantine scholar limit himself to giving a logical exegesis of (...) the arguments of a dialogue which already bears the imprint of the Neoplatonists’ theological interpretations, but he also assumes the role of an active and impartial judge of its logical scope. This innovation, of great historical value, lies in the Aristotelian reading-interpretation of a Platonic dialogue, specifically of Parmenides’ dialectical arguments. Thus, I intend to analyze Pachymeres’ numerous references in specific Aristotelian doctrines that are spread throughout all of Pachymeres’ ad hoc scholia on Parmenides’ arguments and serve as both supplementary and corrective exegetic premises within his analysis, by giving a new perspective through the citation and the transcription of similar commentaries drawn from his edited and his unedited philosophical works, as well as to demonstrate, through a thorough investigation of Pachymeres’ unedited works mainly on Aristotle’s Organon, the key-role that Aristotle’s theory on dialectic plays in Pachymeres’ thought and specifically the dialectical value that the scholiast accords to the Platonic dialogue. My main concern is to prove, in the end, that Pachymeres’ usage of Aristotle for commenting on Plato’s text is a form of exercise, a way to train his students in proper philosophical non-fallacious argumentation. (shrink)

Starting from the 13th century, the question of defining theology as a science gained prominence within a new epistemological reflection on the discipline. It has been hypothesized that the availability of new translations of Aristotelian works significantly contributed to the growing interest among theologians in the theory of science. One of the most prominent intellectuals who recognized the necessity of defining theology as a science and outlining its boundaries and investigative methods in relation to other disciplines, was Albert the Great (...) (d. 1280). Numerous studies have been dedicated to exploring Albert’s treatment of this subject since the 1930s. However, little to no attention has been given to the role played by Arabic sources, particularly the works of Avicenna (Ibn Sīnā, d. 1037), the philosopher and polymath of Persian origin, in shaping Albert’s own definition of theology as a science. This contribution concentrates on the analysis of a section of the Summa Theologiae (Treatise I, quaestio V, chapter 3), with particular emphasis on the ‘translation’ of the logical-argumentative method from its domain of application in scientific and philosophical research to the branch of theology dedicated to safeguarding Christian doctrine against the criticisms and the attacks of heretics. The aim is to analyze how Albert accomplished this translation of the method of inquiry by drawing parallels between the defence of the principles of philosophical inquiry, which is a primary concern of metaphysics, and the defence of the articles of faith in theology. It is by reconciling sources from both the Christian and the Arabo-Islamic traditions that Albert claims the use of a form of dialectic argumentation within theology. (shrink)

This contribution explores in detail the presence and the context of two quotations of the philosopher and theologian Abū Ḥāmid al-Ġazālī (Algazel for the Latin world) in Albert the Great’s late Summa theologiae sive de mirabili scientia Dei. The two quotations, which concern the notion of the soul as “abridged letter” or “copy” [nusḫa muḫtaṣara, chartula brevis] on which all pieces of knowledge are potentially transcribed, occur in two significant textual points of Albert’s Summa. Two different aspects of al-Ġazālī’s simile (...) are addressed in the article: the consideration of the soul as a book, which has extremely wide biblical and literary echoes, and the consideration of the soul as a place, also with regard to the already Aristotelian, and then Albertinian notion of locus intelligibilium. The feature the two passages by Albert share is the acknowledgment of Algazel as a source of primary importance, capable of corroborating with his authority both a Christian theological doctrine and the littera itself of Aristotle’s De anima, in a culturally momentous philosophical-theological, and Islamic-Christian, cooperation. Thanks to a focused analysis on further contexts of reception of the same Ġazālīan image, which bear witness to its peculiar memorability and its differentiated usages, the article argues in conclusion in favour of a more attentive and in-depth study of philosophical similes such as the one here discussed. (shrink)

This contribution aims to introduce Michael’s doctrine of the soul, developed in the 4th distinctio of the Liber quatuor distinctionum, and to show how the soul is the fulcrum of Michael’s scientific reflection on astrology. Furthermore, some close similarities between Michael’s Liber introductorius and one of the best-known encyclopaedic works of the Andalusian world, the Epistles of the Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ, shed light on the richness of the Toledan milieu of the time and Michael Scot’s formative period in Toledo.

This article examines by textual criticism a manuscript of the early fifteenth century preserved at the Stadtbibliothek Lübeck. Being a textual witness of Peter of Ailly’s Insolubilia, the Lübeck manuscript, then unknown, is of special interest for my critical edition of Peter’s treatise (Turnhout: Brepols 2022). However, this witness turns out to be of minor importance for the constitution of the critical text. As an addendum to my edition, this article also provides the reader with a full documentation of all (...) variant readings in the Lübeck manuscript. (shrink)

In Olivi´s division of the sciences, which can be found in his treatise De perlegendis philosophorum libris, c. 9, there seems to be a twofold place for metaphysics: one as part of the theoretical sciences and another as part of the practical, alongside medicine and ethics. This view is based on a misreading of the manuscripts. For the second appearance of metaphysics one should read “mechanica” instead. Thus, this paper shows that the thesis of an unconventional approach to metaphysics in (...) Olivi cannot be sustained by De perlegendis philosophorum libris. (shrink)

Este capítulo está dedicado a las fuentes ópticas de Leonardo da Vinci, que pueden haber contribuido a su conocimiento y a su pericia práctica de la perspectiva.

This paper tests the principle of an analysis of scientific contents, related to an examination of the norms of rationality. In the second half of XIIIth century, optics was a controversial topic on the matter of extramission vs. intromission of visual rays. Grosseteste, Bacon and Pecham took part to this dispute. The analysis of linguistic acceptations of truth in this time shows that the norms of rationality clearly partakes of authority. Now, following Augustine's authority, Franciscan scientists ought to have maintained (...) the intromission thesis, but did not. Therefore, the study of this controversy escapes to the programme of relativism defended in the field of sociology of scientific knowledge. It incites to confine the analysis of contents to logical inconsistencies, axioms and postulates. Such an analysis so becomes congruent with anhistorical norms of rationality. Cet article se propose de tester le principe d'une analyse sociologique des contenus scientifiques reliée à un examen des normes de rationalité. Dans la deuxième moitié du XIIIe siècle, est apparu une controverse sur l'extramission vs. l'intromission des rayons visuels, à laquelle prirent part Grossesteste, Bacon et Pecham. L'analyse des acceptions du mot vérité à cette époque montre que les arguments d'autorité faisaient partie des normes de rationalité. Or, en suivant l'autorité de Saint Augustin, les savants franciscains auraient dû soutenir l'intromission, ce qu'ils ne firent pas. L'étude de cette controverse échappe donc au programme d'une sociologie des sciences relativiste. Elle incite à limiter l'analyse des contenus aux seules failles logiques, axiomes et postulats, et rend ainsi cette analyse congruente avec les normes anhistoriques de la rationalité. (shrink)