Throughout the greater part of the twentieth century, both in the analytic and continental traditions, metaphysics was deemed to be passé. The last few decades, however, have witnessed a remarkable growth of interest among analytic philosophers in various traditional metaphysical topics, such as modality, truth, causality, etc. which resulted in the emergence of various forms of analytic metaphysics. The new forms of metaphysics differ from its traditional forms mostly in their methodology and in the range of proposed solutions to particular (...) problems. Besides these and other differences, however, there are also many similarities and there are even some who intentionally develop traditional metaphysical themes using the contemporary analytical methods. All these developments call for detailed exploration, which is the general goal of the present publication Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic. The publication is the fruit of the conference which took place in Prague in 2010 and which had for its aim to bring together those willing to explore relations between the traditional and contemporary concerns, both from among the leading analytic philosophers working in metaphysics and the historians of philosophy devoted to the study of the metaphysical tradition. The specific focus of the conference was a re-examination of topics such as categories, metaphysical structure, substance and accident, existence, modalities, and predication. (shrink)

The early Brentano identifies intentionality with intentional inexistence, i.e., with a kind of indwelling of the intentional object in the mind. The latter concept cannot be grasped apart from its scholastic background and the Aristotelian—Thomistic doctrine of the multiple use of being (to on legetai pollachos). The fact that Brentano abandoned the theory of the intentional inexistence in the course of time does not contradict the thesis that it is intentional inexistence and not the modern conception of reference or (...) directedness to something other which comprises the essence of intentionality for the early Brentano. (shrink)

This paper presents the defense by the medieval philosopher Peter Auriol of the thesis that sounds and odors have no real, mind-independent being, but exist only as mental correlates of acts of hearing and smelling. Auriol does not see this as an idiosyncratic position, as he claims to be following not only Aristotle, but also Averroes on the issue. Since it is often thought that non-realism about sensible qualities was “inconceivable” for medieval authors and was made possible only by the (...) early modern scientific revolution led by Galileo, it is crucial to bring Auriol’s position to the fore. Auriol’s view, and its alleged roots in Arabic philosophy, invites us to reassess our standard narrative in the history of philosophy and science. (shrink)

In 1968 the authors of the so-called Harvard Report, proposed the recognition of an irreversible coma as a new criterion for death. The proposal was accepted by the medical, legal, religious and political circles in spite of the lack of any explanation why the irreversible coma combined with the absence of brainstem reflexes, including the respiratory reflex might be equated to death. Such an explanation was formulated in the President’s Commission Report published in 1981. This document stated, that the brain (...) is the central integrator of the body, therefore the destruction of the brain results in the lack of that integration and the death of the organism. Therefore, according to that document, the so-called “brain dead” patients are really, biologically dead; strictly speaking they are not any more biological organisms but collections of organs and tissues. Their death was masked by the use of the medical equipment, but it was a real, biological death. Thus, the explanation given by the President’s Commission Report constituted a biological rationale for the new concept of death, known as “brain death.” However, after the long discussion, this rationale was refuted because of the evidence given by many medical authorities, that the bodies of the “brain dead” and “brainstem dead” patients are alive. In the context of the discussion about the neurological criteria for death, some authors follow the idea of Plato, that human being is the soul or mind, and the body does not belong to the human essence. Therefore, the loss of consciousness, which may be identified with the mind, constitutes the loss of personhood and may be interpreted as human death. The other group stresses the Aristotelian and Thomistic concept that the body belongs to the essence of every living creature, including human. Therefore, as long as the body is alive, the human being is alive and we cannot call the given patient dead even if he is deeply comatose. Moreover, in spite of the opinions dominating in the mass-media, these patients should be considered not only alive but also may be conscious to some degree and their state can be reversible. Their brains are lacking the electrical functions, but the neuronal tissue is alive and that state is reversible for at least first 48 hours since the onset of coma; this phenomenon is called “global ischemic penumbra” and is responsible for the regularly happening events interpreted as miracles, when some of the “brain dead” or “brainstem dead” patients turn to be alive and come back to normal life. Therefore, the neurological criteria of death are still lacking generally accepted scientific basis and should not be used in medicine and in the legal systems as a basis for diagnosing comatose/having no brainstem reflexes/apneic patients dead. (shrink)

This review article explores in a critical spirit the differences between constituent and relational ontology as practiced by four contemporary Aristotelian philosophers, Michael J. Loux, E. J. Lowe, Lukáš Novák, and Stanislav Sousedík.

In a series of publications over the course of a decade, Edward Feser has argued for the defensibility and abiding relevance to issues in contemporary philosophy of Scholastic ideas and arguments, and especially of Aristotelian-Thomistic ideas and arguments. This work has been in the vein of what has come to be known as "analytical Thomism," though the spirit of the project goes back at least to the Neo-Scholasticism of the period from the late nineteenth century to the middle of (...) the twentieth. Neo-Scholastic Essays collects some of Feser's academic papers from the last ten years on themes in metaphysics and philosophy of nature, natural theology, philosophy of mind, and ethics. Among the diverse topics covered are: the relationship between Aristotelian and Newtonian conceptions of motion; the varieties of teleological description and explanation; the proper interpretation of Aquinas's Five Ways; the impossibility of a materialist account of the human intellect; the philosophies of mind of Kripke, Searle, Popper, and Hayek; the metaphysics of value; the natural law understanding of the ethics of private property and taxation; a critique of political libertarianism; and the defensibility and indispensability to a proper understanding of sexual morality of the traditional "perverted faculty argument.". (shrink)

Introduction Conatus is a specific concept within Descartes’s physics. In particular, it assumes a crucial importance in the purely mechanistic description of the nature of light – an issue that Des- cartes considered one of the most crucial challenges, and major achievements, of his natural phil- osophy. According to Descartes’s cosmology, the universe – understood as a material continuum in which there is no vacuum – is composed of a number of separate yet interconnected vortices. Each of these vortices consists (...) in a set of bands rotating around their centres. The bands are com- posed of corpuscles of the three elements, each distinguished on the basis of their different shapes and sizes. The small globules of the second element, although impeded by the other parts of heaven, strive to move away from the centre of the vortex around which they revolve, thus exerting a certain force against the surrounding bodies. This striving or conatus, though a mere force rather than a genuine motion, is transmitted instan- taneously and along straight lines from body to body. According to Descartes, then, the nature of light consists in this striving alone. This account must be understood as strictly connected to the fundamental laws that regulate the Cartesian world. It is particularly important to recall that for Descartes the centrifugal force exerted by a rotating body is understood to be a consequence of the intrinsic rectilinearity of every motion. As the second of the three Laws of Nature set forth in Book II of the Principles of Philosophy establishes, “all motion is in itself rectilinear; and hence any body moving in a circle tends to move away from the centre of the circle which it describes as proved by the fact that a stone rotating in a sling tends to move centrifugally along the tangent of each point described by a circle.1 Similarly, each of the globules of the second element “strives to recede with a great force from the centre of the vortex in which it rotates; it is in fact prevented by the other globules placed all around, not differently than a stone in a sling”. Within this framework, as I show later, conatus occurs when a body’s intrinsic tendency to rectilinear motion is impeded by an external constraint. As Stephen Gaukroger notes, the use of the term conatus in the Principles – like “vis” and “ action ” – shows that Descartes “cannot avoid dynamic terminology”, despite his declared intent “to construe motion in a purely kinematic way”. Indeed, Gaukroger observes that the notions of force action and striving are systematically employed in the Principles – appearing 290, 59 and 8 times, respectively. Also noteworthy, conatus was – together with the more familiar concepts of actio and vis – a significant element of the conceptual apparatus of Scholastic natural philosophy. As will be seen later – and this is the first goal of this paper – here the concept of conatus had a very specific function. Indeed, it was a central part of the Aristotelian- Scholastic account of gravitation. Conatus was used to refer to the striving of a body to move towards its natural place – especially in cases where its natural motion was hindered or impeded by an external mover. This specific use of the concept of conatus can be found in texts on natural philosophy from the end of the sixteenth through the late seventeenth century. Notably, it occurs in some of the late -Scho- lastic texts which held special significance for Descartes’s thought. Therefore, Descartes introduces conatus in a context in which this concept already had a very specific meaning, and one of which he was very probably aware. The possible relations between these two apparently very different con- cepts have therefore to be scrutinized. I thereby propose to undertake a comparison between the Scho- lastic and the Cartesian conceptions of conatus. I hope to show that certain traits of the former are indeed echoed by the latter, although adapted to the much changed physical paradigm of Cartesian physics. In fact, Descartes’s conatus, though sharing some important similarities with the old one, underwent significant transformations in terms of both its meaning and its application. However, I hope to show that these concepts are both used to describe the behaviour of bodies in relation to their intrinsic motive tendency, and in particular when this tendency is impeded or prevented. Such a reconstruction offers two main areas of interest. On an immediate level, it furthers the general efforts of scholars over the past decades to reconstruct the full extent of the relations between Descartes’s thought and Scholastic philosophy. However, there is another significant reason for taking an interest in the ties between the Scholastic and the Cartesian conceptions of conatus. Indeed, the Cartesian conatus must be seen as crucial to a proper understanding of the broader, diverse conceptualization that this idea enjoyed in the thought of many of the most important philosophers of the early modern period, namely Spinoza, Hobbes and Leibniz. In particular, Spinoza, were directly influenced by Descartes in their unique formulations of conatus. Thus a reconstruction of the context in which Descartes formulated his conatus and of its relations to a pre-existing Scholastic conception will enable us to better reconstruct the history of this idea in the early modern period. The paper is structured as follows: in the first part, I provide a thorough review of the Scho- lastic employment of the concept conatus – both its meaning and the extent of its usage. I then show that it occurs in some of the most prominent Cartesian sources. Finally, I shall provide an account of Descartes’s theory of circular motion and conatus with the specific aim of empha- sizing the elements of both continuity and discontinuity that justify the claim that Descartes’s con- ception of conatus is reminiscent of the Scholastic one. (shrink)

Offers an extremely bold, far-reaching, and unsuspected thesis in the history of philosophy: Aristotelianism was a dominant movement of the British philosophical landscape, especially in the field of logic, and it had a long survival. British Aristotelian doctrines were strongly empiricist in nature, both in the theory of knowledge and in scientific method; this character marked and influenced further developments in British philosophy at the end of the century, and eventually gave rise to what we now call British empiricism, which (...) is represented by philosophers such as John Locke, George Berkeley and David Hume. Beyond the apparent and explicit criticism of the old Scholastic and Aristotelian philosophy, which has been very well recognized by the scholarship in the twentieth century and which has contributed to the false notion that early modern philosophy emerged as a reaction to Aristotelianism, the present research examines the continuity, the original developments and the impact of Aristotelian doctrines and terminology in logic and epistemology as the background for the rise of empiricism.Without the Aristotelian tradition, without its doctrines, and without its conceptual elaborations, British empiricism would never have been born. The book emphasizes that philosophy is not defined only by the ‘great names’, but also by minor authors, who determine the intellectual milieu from which the canonical names emerge. It considers every single published work of logic between the middle of the sixteenth and the end of the seventeenth century, being acquainted with a number of surviving manuscripts and being well-informed about the best existing scholarship in the field. ​. (shrink)

As Roger Ariew shows, one of the most fascinating challenges for the authors trying to create a Cartesian complete course on philosophy was coming up with a Cartesian Logic based on the existing texts of the master. Were the few simple rules from the Discourse on Method the "logic" of Descartes? Were the Rules for the Direction of the Mind "logic"? How can we even have a logic without syllogism? When looking at the authors studied by Ariew one finds that (...) the best that they could come up was adding some Cartesian elements on what remains basically a traditional Aristotelian Logic. It seems that there was no Cartesian Logic after all.I want to show here that Cartesian Logic is something else, not exactly... (shrink)

Introducing formal causation / Ludger Jansen and Petter Sandstad -- Form, intention, information : from scholastic logic to artificial intelligence / Gyula Klima -- Formal causation : accidental and substantial / David S. Oderberg -- A non-hylomorphic account of formal causation / Petter Sandstad and Ludger Jansen -- Formal causes for powers theorists / Giacomo Giannini and Stephen Mumford -- Away with dispositional essences in trope theory / Jani Hakkarainen and Markku Keinänen -- Functional powers / Michele Paolini Paoletti (...) -- An Aristotelian approach to existential dependence / Benjamin Schnieder and Jonas Werner -- Finean feature dependence and the Aristotelian alternative / Wolfgang Sattler -- A problem for natural-kind essentialism and formal causes / José Tomás Alvarado and Matthew Tugby -- Form as cause and the formal cause : Aristotle's answer / James G. Lennox -- Form, cause, and explanation in biology : a neo-Aristotelian perspective / Christopher J. Austin -- Formal explanation and mechanisms of conceptual representation / Sandeep Prasada. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Descartes and the Last ScholasticsBlake D. DuttonRoger Ariew. Descartes and the Last Scholastics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999. Pp. xi + 230. Cloth, $42.50.The attempt to understand Descartes vis-à-vis the scholastic tradition dates back to the studies of Etienne Gilson early in this century. Though Descartes saw himself as a revolutionary who would overthrow the Aristotelianism entrenched in the universities, Gilson was able to demonstrate his reliance (...) upon a variety of scholastic sources for important terminology, distinctions, and arguments which permeate his writings. Unfortunately, this line of investigation was largely ignored among Anglo-American scholars who were generally hostile to Scholasticism and uninterested in contextualizing Descartes's thought. However, since the mid-eighties there has been a distinct shift in attitude as scholars have increasingly turned their attention to the place of Scholasticism within Descartes's intellectual environment. Among these, Roger Ariew has to be counted as one of the most sophisticated, and his new book, Descartes and the Late Scholastics, marks an important contribution to the growing literature on the topic.Ariew's book is actually a collection of essays published over the last decade, including two which he co-authored with Marjorie Grene. Many of these have been substantially expanded to include fresh material and reworked so as to give the whole a greater sense of continuity. After a marvelous opening chapter in which he lays out his overall account of Descartes's attitude towards Scholasticism, Ariew presents the remaining essays in two large groups: those dealing with the immediate context of Descartes's thought and those dealing with its reception through the early part of the eighteenth century.Among the more interesting results of the first group of studies is Ariew's claim that the scholastic climate in and around Paris during Descartes's lifetime was predominately Scotistic rather than Thomistic. He shows this by looking at positions taken by a number of Parisian schoolmen on important issues which typically divided Scotists and Thomists. Ariew goes on to argue that not only was the Parisian environment Scotistic, but that Descartes aligned himself with the Scotists on many key issues in both physics (e.g., that time is independent of motion) and metaphysics (e.g., that the principle of individuation is a form). This is certainly an intriguing claim since most studies of this type have viewed Descartes in relation to Aquinas and those Jesuit thinkers who were broadly Thomistic in outlook. In bringing to light this Scotistic background, Ariew has opened up an important new line of inquiry.Other topics included in this first section are the literary and philosophical background [End Page 275] to the "new way of ideas" of which Descartes is a founder, the place of Descartes's doctrine of matter and form in seventeenth century debates over hylomorphism, and the reaction of Scholastics to the observational results of the new astronomy. What emerges in these essays is not only a highly nuanced view of Descartes's relation to Scholasticism, but an important corrective to still prevalent views of the Scholastics as reactionary and blindly opposed to developments within the new science. This last point is made with particular force in the fifth essay entitled "Scholastics and the New Astronomy." There Ariew argues that the astronomical observations of Galileo et alia were not in themselves decisive for overthrowing the Aristotelian cosmology as it had been articulated in the seventeenth century. This is because scholastic astronomers were generally accepting of such findings (e.g., sunspots) and were able to accommodate them within their own systems by making relatively minor adjustments. Although these systems ultimately proved themselves inadequate, Ariew makes a strong case that the Aristotelianism of the seventeenth century was sufficiently fluid to accommodate most of what the astronomers offered up. Thus the necessity for a radical overhaul of basic philosophical and scientific assumptions was by no means as evident as standard histories of this period would have us believe.The second section of the book is dedicated to debates over Cartesianism and its fate in the generations immediately following Descartes's death. Here Ariew provides a wealth of detail about various condemnations of Cartesianism, a comparative study of... (shrink)

The primary aim of this paper is to provide a new account of Descartes’s positive philosophical view on sensory perception, and to do so in a way that will establish a hitherto unnoticed continuity between his thought and that of his scholastic Aristotelian predecessors on the topic of sensory perception. I will argue that the basic framework of the scholastic Aristotelian view on sensory perception (as traditionally understood) is operative within Descartes's own view, and then reveal some insights (...) on the issue of whether Descartes was a representationalist about sensory perception by critically examining one kind of representationalist reading of Descartes under the lens of my account. I will conclude by examining the implications that my view has for the proposed distinction between Descartes and the scholastics based on attributing representationalism to the former and direct-realism to the latter. (shrink)

This paper assesses the complex debt of Machiavelli’s moral and political thought to Aristotle and the Aristotelian tradition, especially in its Scholastic variant. My claim is that Machiavelli’s attitude vis-à-vis Aristotle is twofold because it reflects two different aspects of Aristotle’s moral and political theory that are closely intertwined and that were selectively developed by subsequent Aristotelian Scholastic commentators: a teleological and a realist aspect. On one hand, Machiavelli provides a model that dramatically breaks with Aristotle on, for (...) example, the question of the origin of human society and the moral prudence of rulers. On the other hand, Machiavelli’s engagement with Aristotle amounts to something more complex than a simple rejection. The Florentine appears to read Aristotle rather selectively, and emphasizes the realist dimension of certain Aristotelian ideas that suit his own original overturning of classical moral and political ideas. I use two paradigmatic themes in which the Aristotelian teleological-realist divide is most evident, i.e. the account of the origin of human society and the case of prudence, in order to prove the dual relationship of Machiavelli’s thought with Aristotelianism. (shrink)

Scholastic terminology, with roots in theology and the now largely unfamiliar Latin language, is a perpetual obstacle for the uninitiated and a potential cause of misunderstanding and cross-argument in communication with non-Scholastics. Yet if any jargon is legitimate, one tried by centuries of definition and discussion of fundamental problems has classic value and is a fit object of study in the modern mood of linguistic analysis. The present welcome addition to the English language is a compact collection of some (...) 1,600 common terms and phrases current in the general stream of Thomist Aristotelian philosophy. Its ideal is the crisp definition which the author’s pedagogical experience suggests is necessary to understand a general course of such philosophy. Choice of matter is practical, not exhaustive and makes no attempt to trace the diversity of historical usage. Occasionally a precise reference is given to the classic origin of its decisive definition, mainly to the works of Aristotle and St. Thomas and occasionally to Augustine, Boethius, Scotus and Suarez. For fuller information reference is also made to current Thomist monographs in English. (shrink)

In today’s academia, scholars are compelled to be productive. The result is an overabundance of publications that often are formulaic follow-ups to the debates du jour. The essays included in this collection are a fortunate exception to this rule—they are original and make refreshingly bold claims. The articles are devoted to the reception of Aristotle’s logic and metaphysics in the Middle Ages and show the vitality of the cluster of scholars known as the “Copenhagen School of Medieval Philosophy.” Even though (...) the school does not identify as “neo-scholastic”, many of its members accept the idea that scholastic interpretations are relevant to our understanding of Aristotle’s thought. Undoubtedly, this is a... (shrink)

The study attempts to survey the way in which the rationalist spirit (especially Aristotle’s philosophy) was assimilated by Christian thinking in the patristic and scholastic periods. This shows that the great schism is the outcome not only of dogmatic controversies, but also of accepting and promoting distinctive-argumentative methodologies to justify these dogmas. If in the West theory was viewed as contemplation and as method for conceptual construction, in the East the emphasis was laid exclusively on contemplation and revelation. Furthermore, (...) the West accepted the autonomy of sciences by creating the “seven liberal arts” - an unacceptable concept for the Orthodox world, where logic was considered a mere organon, and philosophy, an ancilla theologiae. Among the main consequences detectable to this day are the varied cultural moulds that exist in the Christian world, as well as the scientific and civilizational lagging behind of the Orthodox East. (shrink)

The idea that Wittgenstein was part of the Aristotelian‐Thomist tradition may seem even more far‐fetched. Wittgenstein argued that we are suffering from a mythology about the nature of thought and meaning. In Action, Emotion and Will, under the influence of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Wittgenstein, Anthony Kenny presented an anti‐causalist account of intentional action. Aquinas and Wittgenstein do not defend exactly the same doctrines about intentionality. But reading them in parallel enhances the understanding we can have of each of them, (...) and assists us in understanding the issues they both raise. One side‐effect of Wittgenstein's liberation of philosophy from Cartesian prejudices is that it enables those who accept it to give a more sympathetic welcome to the writings of pre‐Cartesian philosophers, and in particular to medieval scholastics. Thinking of Aquinas and Wittgenstein as belonging to the same tradition radically challenges the understanding we have of both the Austro‐British philosopher and the Doctor Communis. (shrink)

Although most natural law ethical theories recognize moral absolutes, there is not much agreement even among natural law theorists about how to identify them. The author argues that in order to understand and determine the morality (or immorality) of a human action, it must be considered in relation to the organized system of human practices within which it is performed. Such an approach, he argues, is to be found in the natural law theory of Thomas Aquinas, especially once it is (...) recognized that the logical structure of Aquinas's ethical theory is basically that of an Aristotelian science. In order to depict this structure and to explain how it bears upon the analysis of action, the author investigates a number of issues that have attracted the attention of Thomistic and Aristotelian scholarship. He examines the nature of practical reason, its relationship with theoretical reason, the derivation of lower from higher ethical principles, the incommensurability of human goods, the relationship between will and intellect, and the principle of double effect. The book will be useful to students and scholars interested in ethics, especially from an Aristotelian and/or Thomistic perspective. One appendix reproduces the Leonine text of the De malo (question 6), with facing English translation. Another appendix provides facing Latin text and English translation of the Summa Theologiae I-II (question 94, article 2). ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kevin L. Flannery, S.J., author of many works on the history of logic--particularly Aristotelian logic--is dean of the faculty of philosophy and professor of the history of ancient philosophy at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome. PRAISE FOR THE BOOK: ""I know of no more careful and detailed study of Thomas's principle that the realms of theoretical and practical rationality are parallel. This principle is indeed central to an understanding of Thomas Aquinas's ethical thought, and Father Flannery examines its ramifications most perspicaciously. His book constitutes a valuable and important addition to the Thomistic literature. Father Flannery's writing is lucid, if not always extremely engaging, and his arguments are well supported by references to, and quotations from, the Aristotelian and Thomistic texts upon which they are based.""--The Medieval Review ""It would be hard to overstate the importance of this book at the present juncture of Thomistic studies.""--Ralph McInerny, University of Notre Dame ""... of interest and of great value mostly to specialists in Aquinas's ethics or moral theory more generally. Flannery presents complex matters clearly, and his explanations of the logical presuppositions of Aquinas's moral thought are always illuminating.""--Jean Porter, Theological Studies ""This is a significant work that belongs on the bookshelf of any serious student of Aquinas.... An important contribution to Thomistic studies.""--Irish Theological Quarterly ""This scholastic text will particularly appeal to thinkers interested in Aristotelian mathematics and logic and their practical integration into Thomistic natural law ethics. However, all natural law scholars must address the questions of context and method raised by Flannery's insights and his careful, precise textual analyses."" -- Beverly Whelton, Review of Metaphysics. (shrink)

Introduction -- The attack on aristotelian-scholastic metaphysics -- The analysis of things : substance, quality, and the tree of porphyry -- Thing and word : a critique of transcendental terms -- From a grammatical point of view : the reduction of the categories -- Soul, nature, morality, and God -- Soul and nature : a critique of aristotelian psychology and natural philosophy -- The virtues and the road to heavenly pleasure -- Speaking about the ineffable : the Trinity -- (...) Towards a humanist dialectic -- Dialectic I : propositions, the square of contraries, proof, and argument -- Dialectic II : forms of argumentation -- Conclusion: Valla and "ordinary language philosophy". (shrink)

Once Alexander of Aphrodisias revived the Peripatetic philosophy in the late secondcentury CE, Aristotle's surviving corpus became the guiding texts for a philosophicalschool, and, like any school, the Aristotelian one tried to systematize and dogmatizeits founder's teachings into a coherent and comprehensive approach to everything. Thisway of reading Aristotle was the dominant one through the Islamic and Christian Middle Ages, although occasionally a dissenter might express some doubt about how certain Aristotle was on various points, particularly in cosmology and natural (...) science. Nordid Aristotle's detractors in the modern period cease to regard his philosophy as totallydogmatic—though fundamentally mistaken, of course. It was not until German scholarship in the nineteenth century thought it could discern temporal development in Aristotle's approach to a wide variety of questions that the scholastic view ceased to be theestablished wisdom. But now this historical approach has been largely jettisoned, leaving us with an Aristotelian corpus in which we can recognize many doctrinal tensions and doubts that were very likely endemic to Aristotle's thought right to the end of his life. (shrink)

Once Alexander of Aphrodisias revived the Peripatetic philosophy in the late secondcentury CE, Aristotle's surviving corpus became the guiding texts for a philosophicalschool, and, like any school, the Aristotelian one tried to systematize and dogmatizeits founder's teachings into a coherent and comprehensive approach to everything. Thisway of reading Aristotle was the dominant one through the Islamic and Christian Middle Ages, although occasionally a dissenter might express some doubt about how certain Aristotle was on various points, particularly in cosmology and natural (...) science. Nordid Aristotle's detractors in the modern period cease to regard his philosophy as totallydogmatic—though fundamentally mistaken, of course. It was not until German scholarship in the nineteenth century thought it could discern temporal development in Aristotle's approach to a wide variety of questions that the scholastic view ceased to be theestablished wisdom. But now this historical approach has been largely jettisoned, leaving us with an Aristotelian corpus in which we can recognize many doctrinal tensions and doubts that were very likely endemic to Aristotle's thought right to the end of his life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.1 (2003) 127-128 [Access article in PDF] Dennis Des Chene. Life's Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Pp. viii + 220. Cloth, $45.00. The history of philosophy aims at the recovery and interpretation of past thought, and its reconstructions seek to avoid anachronism. Dennis Des Chene's book is exemplary in this respect. It offers a sophisticated (...) and accurate report on Late Scholastic views and arguments about life and its form and principle, the soul. It is full of subtle and informed discussions of texts from, principally, Francisco Toledo, Pedro Fonseca, the commentators from Coimbra, Francisco Suárez, and Rodrigo de Arriaga.But the aim of the history of philosophy is philosophical and not exclusively historical. Recovery of the past is, for the historian of philosophy, at the service of contemporary understanding. The Late Scholastic authors studied by Des Chene understood this to be so. Suárez, for instance, distinguished between those doctrines and inquiries which are "antiquated (antiquatae) and wholly relegated from philosophy" and those which are not (Metaphysical Disputations, "Copious Index to Aristotle's Metaphysics," Book I, ch. 7). Unfortunately, when judged from this perspective, Des Chene's book is not as successful.In spite of its many comparisons between current debates, Descartes's views, and Late Scholastic doctrines, the book does not succeed in extracting much by way of genuine philosophical insight. Though well-informed and intelligent, for the most part these glosses are mere statements of Late Scholastic views in contemporary terms. But correctly describing alchemical theories from the point of view of modern chemistry does not make them any less archaic.This book is indeed more a contribution to the history of ideas or of science than to the history of philosophy. To be fair, it is true that, first, as such it is a most valuable contribution; second, much of what Late Scholastics had to say about life and the soul is indeed antiquated; third, even if philosophically antiquated, an adequate grasp of Late Aristotelian thought on these matters is necessary to understand Descartes and subsequent developments; and finally, the kind of informed historical recovery that Des Chene has provided here is a necessary condition for whatever philosophical lessons could be gained from these texts.Life's Form is divided into four parts. The first, "Data for the Study of Souls," looks at the phenomena which the Late Aristotelians sought to understand and explain, recovering both their grasp of the place of the living among other substances, and the constraints, [End Page 127] originating both from accumulated experience and from Christian faith, to which they were subject.The second part, "Defining the Soul," first examines the question of how to define life. It then looks at the definition of the soul as "first act of an organic or potentially living physical body"—whether the soul is an accident of the body, an entirely separate substance, or the substantial form of the body. Here one finds addressed the question whether there is a form of the body separate from the soul, or whether strictly the body has only one form, the soul. The issue of cadaveric forms, peculiar forms of corpses arising after death and the departure of the soul, comes up here. In the last section of this part Des Chene examines the definition of the soul as a principle of life and the relation, both epistemological and ontological, between this definition in terms of the operations of the soul, and the earlier one of the soul as form, that is, in terms of its being.Part 3, "Powers and Parts," looks at the vegetative (nutritive, reproductive, and augmentative), animal (sensitive), and spiritual (intellective) powers of the soul. Des Chene examines the criteria for distinguishing between powers, the relation between the one soul and its many powers, and the unity of the soul. "Unity," the fourth part of the book, takes up this last topic. It looks at the vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual powers as "parts" of the... (shrink)

An assessment of Descartes’s relation to his Aristotelian contemporaries in his Regulae ad directionem ingenii—and more specifically his relation to the theory of scientific habitus—has never been undertaken and is long overdue. Despite broad scholarly consensus that Descartes rejected the scholastic theory of scientific habitus in the Regulae, I will show that, in fact, he redefines a centuries-old scholastic debate about the unity of science, and that he does so by employing, not rejecting, the concept of scientific habitus. (...) For Descartes, the sciences are collectively one in virtue of a habitus which inclines the intellect to regard all things, not as they are in reality, but rather as they are relative to the intellect alone. Descartes establishes the unity of science via what Suárez refers to as “extrinsic denomination” in Disputationes metaphysicae 44.11.64. This creates a serious problem. As he no doubt knew and as Suárez would have rightly pointed out, the extrinsic denominations that Descartes employs in the Regulae have no ontological basis in the things denominated. Descartes’s method creates, arguably for the first time, a chasm between how things can be known by the intellect and how they are in reality—i.e., between “epistemology” and “ontology”—that motivates him to pursue metaphysics after the Regulae. (shrink)

This is a new impression of a Belgian work of 1903, translated by the late Dr. Peter Coffey in 1907, which presented an overall survey by the expert historian, Professor de Wulf of the common nature, methods and main disciplines of medieval Aristotelian philosophy and of its modern revival, especially in the University of Louvain some fifty years ago. Though it is now inevitably dated, especially concerning neoscholasticism, it is still a valuable introduction for the lay student to the common (...) spirit and organization of intellectual studies in the middle ages, when theology fertilized without smothering philosophy and philosophers exhibited a living diversity within a solid common tradition of wisdom. (shrink)

Wordsworth's philosophical outlook is usually thought of as, in part, combining empiricists' claims about the passivity of sensation with Platonic claims about the reality of forms. Without denying these fundamental orientations, it is argued that Wordsworth's orientation can be seen too against the background of scholastic Aristotelianism. Like the Aristotelians who debated with Locke, Wordsworth accepts the passivity not just of sensation but of knowledge of objects external to the mind, and, in common with the Aristotelian rejection of (...) Platonism, he accepts that the essences of things are somehow intrinsic to or immanent in the things themselves. (shrink)

Broadly speaking, ancient concepts of causality in terms of explanatory priority have been contrasted with modern discussions of causality concerned with agents or events sufficient to produce effects. As Richard Taylor claimed in the 1967 Encyclopedia of Philosophy, of the four causes considered by Aristotle, all but the notion of efficient cause is now archaic. What we will consider here is a notion even less familiar than Aristotelian material, formal, and final causes—what we will call 'demonstrational causality'. Demonstrational causality refers (...) to the dependence of the conclusion on the premises of a demonstration. Here, if ever, we have a case of explanational priority, since among other things what is required of the premises is that they be better known or more manifest than the conclusion. But, oddly enough, Aristotle and his medieval commentators describe demonstrational causality in the same terms as efficient causality. Aristotle speaks of the conclusion as an "effect" of the premises; his commentators speak of the "sufficiency" of first principles or axioms in producing the conclusion. (shrink)

In recent years more and more scholars of early modern philosophy have come to acknowledge that our understanding of Descartes’s thought benefits greatly from consideration of his intellectual background. Research in this direction has taken off, but much work remains to be done. Dennis Des Chene offers a major contribution to this enterprise. This erudite book is the result of a very impressive body of research into a number of late Aristotelian scholastics, some fairly well known, such as Suárez, others (...) quite obscure. Two thirds of the book is devoted to the Aristotelians, with occasional references to Descartes; the last third focuses on Descartes, although there still much Aristotelian ground is covered. Des Chene indicates three major themes for his book: natural change and agency, the structure of material substance, and finality. (shrink)

What does Descartes's embryology look, if related to the Scholastic theories of his time? In order to reply to this question, the present chapter aims at sketching a portrait of the embryological epigenetics Descartes could find in his recognized Scholastic sources (the Commentaries on Aristotle by Toledo, the Coimbra Jesuits, Suárez, and Rubio, as well as the Summae by Eustachius a Sancto Paulo and Abra de Raçonis), a tradition that received and incorporated in the Aristotelian-Galenic body many novelties (...) from Renaissance medicine, especially Fernel, Paré, and Vallès. It being impossible to deal extensively with the whole of the contents of these works, I picked up three issues in particular, corresponding to the first three paragraphs of this paper: 1) the nature of the semen, and the action of the vis formativa, as well as its relationship with vital heat and temperaments; 2) the problem of the real and/or rational distinction(s) between the generative, the nutritive, and the augmentative powers; 3) the epigenetic order of generation of vital organs, i.e. the right sequence over which the fundamental organs of a living body are generated and then ensouled. In the last paragraph I integrate these reconstructions with some conclusions about Descartes' own theory. (shrink)

Early modern scholastic and Aristotelian philosophy is now a growing area of study. However, little attention has been paid to the structure and form of late Aristotelian texts, partly because they have often been seen as baroque and excessively intricate in construction. This article examines the role of structural and stylistic issues in the De anima commentary of the Jesuit author Hieronymus Dandinus, focusing particularly on the techniques he used to integrate knowledge from other disciplines and expand the familiar (...) commentary format. It argues that taking these issues seriously has important implications for our understanding of the dynamics of reading Aristotle in the early modern period. (shrink)

Causality is without doubt one of the main topics of Hobbes's philosophy. Quite justifiably, F. Brandt stated that Chapters 9 and 10 of De Corpore, which expound Hobbes's doctrine of causality, are the most crucial ones ever written by Hobbes. According to Hobbes the quest for causes is the quintessence of all philosophical inquiry. "Philosophy is such knowledge of effects or appearances, as we acquire by true ratiocination from the knowledge we have first of their causes or generation. And again, (...) of such causes or generations as may be from knowing first their effects." Although this definition as such is quite peculiar and fraught with difficulties, the description of philosophy in terms of causal knowledge is in itself rather traditional. Hobbes himself admits that he follows the Aristotelian dictum scire est per causas scire. However, although Hobbes agrees with the Aristotelians that knowledge bears a causal character, he fundamentally disagrees with them as to "what he saw to be genuinely causative." Hobbes's doctrine of causes may be seen as a systematic attempt to discard the scholastic view on causality and replace it with strict mechanistic explanatory principles. Therefore, Hobbes's theory of causality can only be understood properly if we put it against its scholastic background, which is the line of interpretation followed in the present article. It will be made clear that Hobbes's relation to scholasticism is rather complex, ranging from downright rejection to the adoption of terminological distinctions as well as of specific arguments and doctrines. (shrink)

It is no surprise that the phenomenal qualities of our sensory experience pose recalcitrant philosophical problems for a physical materialist metaphysics. The colors of flowers as we experience them by sight, the taste of a ripe peach, and the smell of fresh-cut grass are undeniably part of the experienced world; yet in their phenomenal mode, they do not seem well-placed in the physicist's world of particles and energy fields. It seems, prima facie, that the metaphysical programs found in earlier science (...) and philosophy were better suited to accommodate these qualities: in the hylomorphic world of the Aristotelians, colors were "real qualities" existing as such in flowers; in the dualistic world of Descartes, colors were displaced from things like flowers to the immaterial mind of the perceiver. The dissertation argues that this intuition about our philosophical heritage is both philosophically confused and historically inaccurate. It betrays a misconception about phenomenal qualities and the problems they pose which results from a failure to distinguish phenomenal qualities from a special subset of sensible qualities that we have come to call "secondary" qualities. Disentangled from the primary-secondary quality distinction, phenomenal qualities include all sensible qualities insofar as they form the experiential contents of our sensory perceptions. So considered, phenomenal qualities invite difficult questions about the representational nature and ontological status of our sensory experience even within the Aristotelian and Cartesian metaphysics. By examining Descartes' and the Aristotelians' theories of sense perception with a focus on these questions we achieve a better understanding of "the problem" of phenomenal qualities, better interpretations of these historical theories of sense perception, and suggestions for reshaping the problem space within which we think philosophically about phenomenal qualities today. (shrink)

The article is an instructive exposition of the central problem of scholastic metaphysics, namely: the problem of analogia entis. The author sees the origin of this idea in a historical development, which began with late neoplatonism, continued with Arabic philosophy and ended with medieval authors, especially S. Thomas Aquinas.

Let me say something, to begin with, about wanting weird stuff. Stuff like saucers of mud. The example, famously, is from Anscombe’s Intention (Anscombe Anscombe 957)) where she is, in effect, defending a version of the old scholastic maxim, Omne appetitum appetitur sub specie boni. If your Latin is rusty like mine, what that says is just that every appetite – for better congruence with modern discussions, let’s say every desire – desires under the aspect of the good, or (...) in the wording made current by Velleman, under the guise of the good (Velleman 992). To desire something is to regard it as good in some way, as having some desirability characteristic. And not just any old thing can be regarded as good in some way, as having some desirability characteristic. Obviously if this is correct, it rules against our giving desires any sort of ground-floor role in our understand-. (shrink)

In his Repastinatio . . . Lorenzo Valla launched a heavy attack on Aristotelian-scholastic thought. While most of this book is devoted to metaphysics, language and argumenta- tion, Valla also incorporates chapters on the soul and natural philosophy. Using as criteria good Latin, common sense and common observation, he rejected much of standard Aristotelian teaching on the soul, replacing the hylopmorphic account of the scholastics by an Augustinian one. In this article his arguments on the soul’s autonomy, nobility and (...) independency from the body are studied and analysed. His critique of Aristotle’s opinions on natural phenomena as being untrue to what we observe will also be briefly studied. His arguments do not show him always to be deep or consistent thinker, but the critical review of Aristotelian philosophy proceeds from some philo- sophically interesting assumptions. Moreover, from a broader historical perspective his undermining of Aristotle’s authority may be regarded as a contribution to the final demise of the Aristotelian paradigm, even though the humanist critique was just one factor in this process. (shrink)

This paper explores the scholastic debate about antiperistasis, a mechanism in Aristotle’s dynamics described in the first book of Meteorology as an intensification of a quality caused by the action of the contrary one. After having distinguished this process from a homonymous, but totally different, principle concerning the dynamics of fluids that Aristotle describes in his Physics, I focus on the medieval reception of the former. Scholastic commentators oriented their exegetical effort in elaborating a consistent explanation of an (...) apparently paradoxical process like the intensification of a quality by the opposite one. From the fourteenth century onwards, most of the commentators resorted to the theory of the multiplication of species, according to which each entity acts through the emission of simulacra of the objects (species) that spread spherically in the medium. When these rays encounter an obstacle, such as a contrary quality, they are pushed back towards their source. The reflection of the species determined by the surrounding and opposite quality produces a concentration of the first one, which is therefore intensified. Another distinctive feature of the scholastic interpretation of Aristotle’s antiperistasis is the convergence between the discussions on inorganic and organic matter, physical and medical discourse. This convergence found its most significant expression in the adoption of the model described in the first book of Aristotle’s Meteorology to the biological context of Hippocrates’s Aphorisms I, 15. Following Galen’s exegesis of this passage, medieval commentators established a link between physics and medicine substantially extraneous to Aristotle’s theory. (shrink)

In the late 16th and early 17th centuries, a number of ‘liberal Jesuit scholastics’ produced the last great synthesis of Aristotelian psychology with Christian theology. In this magnificently sympathetic reconstruction of their systems of the soul, Dennis Des Chene rescues Toletus, Suarez, and the other ‘schoolmen’ from neglect which resulted from scornful dismissals by Descartes and his fellows. Deliberating bypassing the political and medical contexts of their work, and focusing almost exclusively on Jesuit rather than other, ‘dissident’ Renaissance Aristotelianisms, Des (...) Chene focusses intensely on intellectual history, what he calls at one point ‘the flurry of subtleties’ of these astonishing systematic commentaries on Aristotle. (shrink)