In this book, Henrik Lagerlund offers students, researchers, and advanced general readers the first complete history of what is perhaps the most famous of all philosophical problems: skepticism. As the first of its kind, the book traces the influence of philosophical skepticism from its roots in the Hellenistic schools of Phyrronism and the Middle Academy up to its impact inside and outside of philosophy today. Along the way, it covers skepticism during the Latin, Arabic, and Greek Middle Ages and during (...) the Renaissance before moving on to cover Descartes's methodological skepticism and Pierre Bayle's super-skepticism in the seventeenth century. In the eighteenth century, it deals with Humean skepticism and the anti-skepticism of Reid and Kant, taking care to also include reflections on the connections between idealism and skepticism. The book covers similar themes in a chapter on G.E. Moore and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and then ends its historical overview with a chapter on skepticism in contemporary philosophy. In the final chapter, Lagerlund captures some of skepticism's impact outside of philosophy, highlighting its relation to issues like the replication crisis in science and knowledge resistance. (shrink)
During the seventeenth century Francisco Surez was considered one of the greatest philosophers of the age: he is now reemerging as a major subject of critical and historical investigation. A leading team of scholars explore his work on ethics, metaphysics, ontology, and theology. This will be the starting-point for future research on Surez.
Sixteenth Century philosophy was a unique synthesis of several philosophical frameworks, a blend of old and new, including but not limited to scholasticism, humanism, Neo-Thomism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism. It was a century that witnessed culturally and philosophically significant moments whose impact still is felt today—some examples include the emergence of Jesuits, the height of the witchcraze, the Protestant Reformation, the rise of philosophical skepticism, Pietro Pomponazzi’s controversial reexamination of traditional understandings of the soul’s mortality, and the deflation of the metaphysical (...) status of substantial forms. Unlike most historical overviews of this moment in philosophy’s history, The Routledge Companion to Sixteenth Century Philosophy does not simplify this colorful period with the application of the dichotomies traditionally applied to this century, such as the misguidingly clear line once drawn between scholasticism and humanism. The Companion includes essays covering the following astonishingly diverse set of topics: philosophical methodologies of the time, the importance of the discovery of the new world, the rise of classical scholarship, trends in logic and logical theory, Nominalism, Avveroism, Neo-Thomism, the Jesuits, the Reformation, Neo-stoicism, the soul’s immortality, witchcraft, Skepticism, the philosophies of language and science and politics, Cosmology, women’s rights, the nature of the understanding, causality, ethics, freedom of the will, natural law, the emergence of the individual in society, the nature of wisdom, and the love of god. And, throughout, the Companion seeks not to compartmentalize these philosophical matters, but instead to show that close attention paid to their continuity may help reveal both the diversity and the profound coherence of the philosophies that emerged in the sixteenth century. (shrink)
In this article, the author studies some central concepts in Avicenna's and sī's modal logics as presented in Avicenna's Al-Ish r t wa'l Tan īh t ( Pointers and Reminders ) and in sī's commentary. In this work, Avicenna introduces some remarkable distinctions in order to interpret Aristotle's modal syllogistic in the Prior Analytics . The author outlines a new interpretation of absolute sentences as temporally indefinite sentences and argues on the basis of this that Avicenna seems to subscribe to (...) the Principle of Plenitude. He also shows that he has no valid proof of the modal conversion rules and that he uses some rather ad hoc distinctions to show that Aristotle's modal syllogistic is correct. The author also notes some interesting differences between Avicenna's and sī's approaches to modal logic. (shrink)
The essays in this book give the first comprehensive picture of the medieval development of philosophical theories concerning the nature of emotions and the influence they have on human choice.
In this paper, I argue that it is in the fourteenth century that the problem of the compatibility or unity of efficient and final causality emerges. William Ockham and John Buridan start to flirt with a mechanized view of nature solely explainable by efficient causality, and they hence push final causality into the human mind and use it to explain for example action, morality and the good. Their argumentation introduces the problem of how to give a unified account of the (...) world, that is, how are nature and freedom compatible. In the paper, I set up the discussion by going through some of the problems associated with final causality in the seventeenth century and show that Ockham and Buridan's problems are similar. I then argue using a formulation from Leibniz's Monadology that the problems here traced should be seen as versions of the mind/body problem. (shrink)
In this book we present the first study of all of his philosophical works from logic and grammar to metaphysics and ethics. It contains a substantial introduction about Kilwardby's life and work as well as a comprehensive bibliography.
Al-Ghazālī's Maqāsid al-falāsifa is an intelligent reworking of Avicenna's Dānesh-name . It was assumed by Latin scholastics that the Maqāsid contained the views of Al-Ghazālī himself. Very well read in Latin translation, it was the basic text from which the Latin authors gained their knowledge of Arabic logic. This article examines the views on the form and matter of the syllogism given in the Maqāsid and considers how they would have been viewed by a Latin reader in the thirteenth century.
In this article, I present two virtually unknown sixteenth-century views of human freedom, that is, the views of Bartolomaeus de Usingen and Jodocus Trutfetter on the one hand and John Mair on the other. Their views serve as a natural context and partial background to the more famous debate on human freedom between Martin Luther and Erasmus of Rotterdam from 1524–1526. Usingen and Trutfetter were Luther’s philosophy teachers in Erfurt. In a passage from Book III of John Mair’s commentary on (...) Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics from 1530, he seems to defend a view of human freedom by which we can will evil for the sake of evil. Very few thinkers in the history of philosophy have defended such a view. The most famous medieval thinker to do so is William Ockham. To illustrate how radical this view is, I place him in the historical context of such thinkers as Plato, Augustine, Buridan, and Descartes. (shrink)
The view of substance defended by William Ockham and John Buridan in the fourteenth century differs radically from the traditional Aristotelian or Thomistic view of substance. Their metaphysical position of substance not only influences the development of natural philosophy, it also changes the preconditions for cognition and epistemology. In this paper I examine the implications of this view on Buridan’s epistemology and particularly on the compatibility of his view of substance with his claim that we have simple substance concepts. I (...) conclude that his metaphysics undermines this claim, but I also offer a suggestion for a possible solution to this problem. (shrink)
: In this paper I argue that the famous problems of dualism between mind (soul) and body, that is, the problems of interaction and unification, concerned philosophers already in a medieval Aristotelian tradition. The problems, although traceable earlier, become particularly visible after William Ockham in the early fourteenth century, and in formulating his own position on the animal and human souls I argue that Buridan realized these problems and laid down the only views on the soul he thought to be (...) possible in an Aristotelian framework. His discussion then sets the stage for the following centuries. In presenting the background to Buridan's discussion I treat Aquinas, Ockham, Walter Chatton and Adam Wodeham. (shrink)
"Divided chronologically into four volumes, The Philosophy of Knowledge: A History presents the history of one of Western philosophy's greatest challenges: understanding the nature of knowledge. Each volume follows conceptions of knowledge that have been proposed, defended, replaced, and proposed anew. Knowledge in Medieval Philosophy covers the development of philosophical treatments of knowledge during the Middle Ages. It covers both Arabic and Latin philosophy, as well as a range of thinkers from the period including Avicenna, Averroes, Thomas Aquinas, John Duns (...) Scotus, William Ockham, and John Buridan. In addition, the volume explores the growth of epistemological scepticism and the subsequent claims made by a variety of philosophers that knowledge was no longer fallible."--Bloomsbury Publishing. (shrink)
The notions of mental representation and intentionality are thought to have originated with Descartes in the seventeenth century. The authors in this book challenge this assumption and show that the history of these ideas can be traced back to the medieval period. They conclude that there is no clear dividing line between western late medieval and early modern philosophy.
Albert of Saxony was a major figure in fourteenth-century logic—one of the most creative and productive periods in the history of logic. He has, however, always been overshadowed by the towering figures of William Ockham and John Buridan, and hence his works are neither edited nor studied as much as they deserve.
For a long time scholars ignored Anselm of Canterbury’s dialogue, De grammatico. It was not until D. P. Henry’s investigations in the 1960s and 70s that it was seriously studied. He showed that it was an important work, but his interpretation was peculiar. The main point of it was to show that Anselm thought traditional logic inadequate for analyzing logical problems and that he wanted to establish a new language that was better suited for the task. Henry also argued that (...) the logical system of the Polish logician, Lesniewski, best captured Anselm’s new logical language.It is only very recently that his interpretation has been challenged. In a paper from 2000, M. M. Adams argued that De grammatico should be seen as an introduction for students to Aristotle’s Categories . She is much closer to the truth than Henry, but Anselm’s work seems too sophisticated to be an introduction, even though the problem he is dealing with. (shrink)
La notion de mondes possibles chez Leibniz est souvent considérée comme un précurseur des théories contemporaines de la sémantique des mondes possibles. Or, cet article vise à montrer que cette lecture de Leibniz est fondamentalement erronée. Leibniz n'a jamais utilisé la notion de mondes possibles pour établir des conditions de vérité pour des phrases modales, mais le rôle de cette notion est strictement théologique, dans le sens où Leibniz l'emploie uniquement pour rendre compte du choix de Dieu dans la création. (...) Dans un premier temps, nous présentons une critique des tentatives d'interpréter les phrases modales chez Leibniz en termes de monde possibles. Dans un deuxième temps, nous nous proposons de montrer que les mondes possibles fonctionnent comme des raisons du choix divin, et que cette thèse est liée à la conception leibnizienne de la nature de la liberté. (shrink)
For a long time scholars ignored Anselm of Canterbury’s dialogue, De grammatico. It was not until D. P. Henry’s investigations in the 1960s and 70s that it was seriously studied. He showed that it was an important work, but his interpretation was peculiar. The main point of it was to show that Anselm thought traditional logic inadequate for analyzing logical problems and that he wanted to establish a new language that was better suited for the task. Henry also argued that (...) the logical system of the Polish logician, Lesniewski, best captured Anselm’s new logical language.It is only very recently that his interpretation has been challenged. In a paper from 2000, M. M. Adams argued that De grammatico should be seen as an introduction for students to Aristotle’s Categories . She is much closer to the truth than Henry, but Anselm’s work seems too sophisticated to be an introduction, even though the problem he is dealing with. (shrink)
The chapter gives a general description of philosophical psychology as it was practiced and taught in the sixteenth century at three of the most important universities of the time, the universities of Erfurt, Padua, and Bologna. Contrary to received notions of the Renaissance it argues that the sixteenth-century philosophical psychology was tightly bound to the Aristotelian tradition. At the University of Erfurt, philosophical psychology was developed with strong adherence to the basic doctrines of Buridanian via moderna, as it had been (...) taught for over a century. The Buridanian approach dominated especially discussions on the metaphysical nature of the human soul and disputes about universal realism versus nominalism. The situation was somewhat different at the universities of Bologna and Padua. The connections between these two universities were close, and they can be seen as developing one and the same Aristotelian tradition. Although the works produced were rather eclectic in nature, they shared research topics as well as conceptual and methodological frameworks which contributed to the unity of the school. In Bologna and Padua, Averroës had a central position as an authority cited and criticized; and philosophical questions concerning the immortality of the soul and the nature of the intellectual species attracted continuous interest. The development of philosophical psychology was also influenced by the special organizational situation of these universities: theology had a relatively unimportant position, and medicine instead had continuous impact on teaching. (shrink)
