This paper aims at a partial rehabilitation of E. A. Moody''s characterization of the 14th century as an age of rising empiricism, specifically by contrasting the conception of the natural science of psychology found in the writings of a prominent 13th-century philosopher (Thomas Aquinas) with those of two 14th-century philosophers (John Buridan and Nicole Oresme). What emerges is that if the meaning of empiricism can be disengaged from modern and contemporary paradigms, and understood more broadly in terms of a cluster (...) of epistemic doctrines concerned with the methodology of knowing, it characterizes very appropriately some of the differences between the ways in which late-medieval thinkers both understood and practised the science of psychology. In particular, whereas Aquinas thinks psychology is about reasoning demonstratively to the real nature of the soul from its evident operations (thereby assimilating psychology to metaphysics), Buridan and Oresme, both of whom doubt whether real animate natures can be known empirically, focus on giving detailed accounts of those operations themselves (thereby assimilating psychology to physics). (shrink)

This paper examines some of the metaphysical assumptions behind Aquinas’s denials that a human rational soul unites with matter at conception and that a human rational soul is capable of developing and arranging the organic parts of an embryo. The paper argues that Buridan does not share these assumptions and holds that a soul is capable of developing and arranging organic parts. It argues that, given hylomorphism about the nature of organisms, including human beings, Buridan’s view is philosophically superior to (...) Aquinas’s in several respects. Finally, the paper poses an apparent inconsistency between several of Buridan’s texts on this topic and attempts to show that the inconsistency is merely apparent. (shrink)

In his Tractatus de Consequentiis, the 14th century logician John Buridan states a theorem, which reads like a refutation of Aristotelian Syllogistics. Syllogistics in its usual form, indeed, faces problems when propositions about the divine persons are involved, and, in some cases, when past- or future-tense propositions occur. Buridan offers different ways of overcoming some of these obstacles. The first aim of this paper is to analyse these ways, the second aim is to draw some conclusions concerning Buridan’s understanding of (...) logic and its relation to theology. (shrink)

This paper shows that our popular account of weakness of will is inconsistent with dilemmas. In dilemmas, agents judge that they ought to do one thing, that they ought to do something else, and that they cannot do both. They must act against either of their two judgments. But such action is commonly understood as weakness of will. An agent is weak-willed in doing something if she judges that she ought to and could do something else instead. Thus, it seems (...) that, in a dilemma, the agent is weak-willed by definition. But this is puzzling: clearly, the two are different phenomena. The puzzle may support scepticism about weakness of will or dilemmas. Here, I argue that the two are consistent on a revised understanding of weakness of will. To do so, I further distinguish the mental states of an agent in a dilemma from those of a weak-willed person. (shrink)

The relation-theory of mental acts proposes that a mental act is a kind of relative entity founded upon the mind and directed at the object of perception or thought. While most medieval philosophers recognized that there is something importantly relational about thought, they nevertheless rejected the view that mental acts are wholly relations. Rather, the dominant view was that a mental act is either in whole or part an Aristotelian quality added to the mind upon which such a relation to (...) the object can be founded. In this paper, I examine Durand of St.-Pourçain's defense of the relation-theory of mental acts against two objections raised against it: the first from John Duns Scotus, among others, and the second from an anonymous Thomist and Adam Wodeham. -/- . (shrink)

The study of the medieval reception of Aristotle’s Topics has largely been oriented toward debates on dialectical argumentation. And this is surely right. Nonetheless, I wish to approach John Buridan’s commentary on the Topics from another perspective, which highlights some semantic features of the set of predicates around which the work is organized. Thus, in my paper I will first reconstruct Buridan’s account of the identification of the predicates discussed in the Topics. I will argue that, for him, they are (...) different in that they reflect one or more features of the way in which definiens and definiendum relate. By doing this, I will shed light on the role the notion of definition plays in Buridan’s commentary, so that an interpretation of it as a work on definition becomes promising. In the second part of the paper, I will offer an analysis of Buridan’s first move in his commentary toward a theory of definition. It concerns the problem of whether there is a definition of definition. In examining Buridan’s answer, I will argue for the close connection between his treatment of definitions and his theory of supposition, so that distinctions among the different modes of supposition help him to disambiguate statements in their possible meanings, and thus to clarify the difficulty related to the definability of definition. (shrink)

Is prime matter the same as its potency, its readiness to take on the entire gamut of corporeal substantial forms? This question, arising from a passage in Averroes, lies at the core of later medieval hylomorphism and was hotly debated. The present article looks at three answers to the question by figures from the first half of the fourteenth century: Gerald Ot who takes a Scotistic approach to the issue, John of Jandun and Peter Auriol taking an Averroan tack, and (...) John Buridan with a nominalistic outlook. The discussion reveals a diversity of positions on the nature of potency and its relation to actuality, and in the case of Buridan an unusual view at the heart of his matter theory: the direct inherence of accidental forms in prime matter. (shrink)

Jean Buridan developed his theory of consequence within a semantical framework compatible with what we now call token-based semantics. In his Treatise on Consequences and Sophismata, Buridan showed...

Thomas Bradwardine (d. 1349) was an English philosopher, logician, and theologian of some note; but though recent scholarship has revived an interest in much of his work, little attention has been paid to an early treatise he wrote on the topic of future contingents, entitled De futuris contingentibus. In this thesis I aim to address this deficit, arguing in particular that the treatise makes original use of the divine power distinction to resolve the apparent conflict between God’s foreknowledge on the (...) one hand, and human free will on the other. Bradwardine argues that God’s foreknowledge operates in accord with God’s ordained power, and so relative to God’s ordained power, our actions are indeed compelled; however, because of Bradwardine’s appeal to the distinction in power, he is able to maintain that our actions remain free relative to God’s absolute power, and are thus free, absolutely speaking. This solution is, I argue, unique to Bradwardine, although it seems to be abandoned in his later writing. Bradwardine’s approach to the problem is heavily influenced by three figures in particular — Boethius, Anselm of Canterbury, and John Duns Scotus — each of whose solutions I discuss in some detail. Furthermore, Bradwardine explicitly places his own solution in opposition to that of William Ockham, and so I give substantial attention to examining Ockham’s position. But while I agree with Bradwardine’s assessment that Ockham’s position undermines God’s foreknowledge in ways that should be untenable to someone of 14th-century Christian commitments, I argue that Bradwardine’s solution amounts to an equally untenable determinism. An appendix contains excerpts from my own English translation of the De futuris contingentibus (the first into any modern language), in parallel with the original Latin. (shrink)

Against the dominant view in contemporary Hobbes scholarship, I argue that Hobbes’ philosophy of language implicitly denies that linguistic expressions refer to anything. I defend this thesis both textually, in light of what Hobbes actually said, and contextually, in light of Hobbes’ desertion of the vocabulary of suppositio, which was prevalent in semantics leading up to Hobbes. Hobbes explained away the apparent fact of linguistic reference via a reductive analysis: the relation between words and things wholly reduces to a composite (...) of the relation of signification between words and conceptions on the one hand, and the relation of representation between conceptions and things on the other. Intentionality, for Hobbes, accrues to conceptions, not words. (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)