Simone Guidi

For Christian theology, the survival of the soul after the death of the body is a matter of fact. However, its philosophical explanation is probably the most peculiar issue of Thomas Aquinas’ radically Aristotelianaccount of body-soul. For both Augustine and Avicenna – who, together with Aristotle, can be considered the main sources of thirteenth century philosophy – the certainty of the immaterial soul’s ability to survive independently from the body was so strong that, coining their very own notions of human spiritual substance, they described it as only partially implied in the act of the body’s information. This account was able to mediate between Aristotle’s idea of the soul as a form of the body and the Neoplatonic theory of the soul as an independent substance....

The article examines Marin Cureau de La Chambre's Système de l'âme (1664), highlighting the role played in the work by the tradition of Italian Renaissance naturalism. La Chambre profoundly criticizes the very concept of 'passion of the soul', attacking the Aristotelian doctrine of the possible intellect but, contemporarily, also the direct interaction between body and mind presupposed by Descartes in Les passions de l'âme. The solution adopted by Cureau is based on the doctrine of intermediate substances, which allows him to resume Ficino's model, reconciling it with Descartes' intellec-tualist dualism and integrating the latter with a panpsychism of Campanellian brand.

This article addresses the Aristotelian debate in the 17th century on the incorporeality of light and its extension, focusing especially on the Iberian and Italian contexts. The aim of the essay is to show that, while late Aristotelianism unitedly rejected light’s corporeity, many differences arose regarding the way in which this incorporeality should be understood. Relevant perspectives in all of their discussions were Scotus’ teaching of the intentional nature of light, and the Neoplatonics’ claim of its metaphysical provenance. In the Iberian environment, Jesuit scholars/theologians (the school of Toledo, the Conimbricenses, Francisco Suárez, and Antonio Rubio) were especially characterized by their attempt to save Aristotle’s original explanation in De Anima, although theoretical discrepancies on many significant points divide them. Italian intellectuals such as Zabarella, Dandini, Lagalla and Liceti were instead more willing to seek a reconciliation between Aristotle’s statement and the explanation of light posited by Scotus and the Neoplatonists, and more receptive to the need for a new theory of matter.

This paper addresses Suárez’s understanding of imagination and phantasy, dealing with it in the general Aristotelian debate on the internal senses. Paragraph 1 sketches Aristotle’s, Avicenna’s and Aquinas’s accounts of imagination, examining especially the boundary between human and animal cognition. Paragraph 2 addresses especially the Jesuits’ understanding of the topology of the internal senses, linking it with the Jesuit strategy for the demonstration of the soul’s immateriality and immortality. Paragraphs 3 and 4 deal with Suárez’s simplification of the internal senses, aimed at establishing a direct opposition between intellection (in men) and a general lower cognitive activity founded in the use of sensory representations (shared by men and animals). Paragraphs 5 and 6 focus on the role of phantasy in Suárez’s account of the illumination of phantasms, on Suárez’s use of Scotus’ concepts of ‘sympathy’, and ‘concomitance’ and the relevance of such a model in the demonstration of the soul’s immortality.

A widespread historiographical portrayal represented Descartes' dualism as constituted in direct contrast with Aquinas' concept of soul-form. In the wake of the many studies that have opposed this prejudice in recent decades, this book reconstructs the fifteenth and seventeenth-century debate on psychology, focusing primarily on the Jesuit context and on the intersection between Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Augustinianism in early modern France. Beginning with a rigorous investigation of the theories of the separated soul, particular attention is then given to the indirect derivation of the Cartesian cogito and innatism from angelological themes of the time. Indeed, in the years in which Descartes elaborates his metaphysics, the immediate proximity between souls and angels is somehow a matter of fact, in the light of which many of the argumentative choices of the Meditations, and even the relationship that closely joins the "thinking substance" with the body-machine, appear clear.

This chapter focuses on the question of the specific truth granted to the human intellect’s concepts qua concepts (simplex apprehensio), as it is presented and discussed in Sebastião do Couto’s commentary on On Interpretation, included in his general commentary on Aristotle’s Dialectics (1606), the final volume of the famous and influential Cursus Conimbricensis (1592–1606). Such a topic finds it roots in a large medieval debate that runs through many authors and especially Augustine, Aquinas, Scotus, Durandus, and Ockham, reaching in the Jesuit early modern context, with Pedro da Fonseca and Francisco Suárez, a complete and eclectic account that paved the way for the modern understanding of “mind.”

This volume publishes the Proceedings of the 1st International Meeting "Thinking Baroque in Portugal" (26-28 June 2017), which dealt with the metaphysical, ethical and political thought of Francisco Suárez. Counting on the collaboration of some of the greatest international specialists in the work and thought of this famous professor of the University of Coimbra in the 17th century, this volume celebrates the 400th anniversary of his death and marks the productivity of his philosophical-theological legacy.

This essay focuses on the ontology of the virtual, looking especially at its historical connection with today’s technology. The work begins by discussing the metaphysical structure of the Aristotelian dynamis, understood as the conceptual root of the Latin virtus. Reading Aristotle, especially through bergsonian concepts, I show how his dynamis allows a proto-deterministic account of spontaneity, strictly related to goal-oriented processes of human serial production and with the possibility of a homogeneous area of manipulation. Thus we stress how the ‘reproductive’ model works in every ontological account of the virtual and especially in the Renaissance ones, connected with the idea of a full “enginerization” of the real. The core of metaphysical virtuality seems to lie rather in an ontological account of “form” that denies its processual becoming and its process of stabilization through an infrastructure. Finally, I reject any ontological use of the virtual in teleonomy, especially in its metaphysical attempt to identify autopoiesis and mechanism, and I conclude by stressing how current digital technology is fully oriented to the reproductive model, conceptually rooted in a metaphysical account of the virtual.

The Question of Truth in Pedro da Fonseca: the Problem of the simplex apprehensio and the Foundation of Logical Identities. This article deals with the theory of truth in Pedro da Fonseca (1528-1599) as it is presented in his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (1577-1612). The first part of the paper is dedicated to Fonseca’s definition of intellective truth within the doctrinal topography of the Aristotelian tradition. The Author especially points out Fonseca’s attempt to justify the notion of a “simple” truth of the “simple apprehension”, based on a specific use of Cajetan’s distinction between “signified act” and “exercised act” as well as on a (partially) nominalist account of the relationship between “simple” and “enunciative” concepts. The second part deals instead with Fonseca’s definition of transcendental truth, understood as the conformity between the intellect and the esse realis of the res, and as the conformity of the latter with exemplars in God’s mind. Here the Author also reconstructs Fonseca’s theory of divine ideas and his theory of logical identities.

The current issue looks into the concept of Man and in particular at the anthropological domain that this notion has represented at different times in the history of modern and contemporary western thought. It does this, however, by focusing on its cut-off points, where questions have revealed a fundamental instability at the root of the very concept of “human’’, thus attempting to show that every “theory of human nature’’ must by its very nature look beyond human nature as it identifies and ‘brings out’ to the point of alienation the inner grammar and constitutive logic of that combination of forces commonly known as ‘Man’. In mapping out a sketch of the elements that make up the setting for this problem, we have set out to give this collection the structure of a round trip. As our starting point for this selection we have taken the mechanistic and naturalistic revolution in the theory of human nature which, starting from Descartes in the heyday of the modern era, for the first time assigns to physiological investigation autonomous prerogatives in defining the human, bringing in a wide range of anthropological paradoxes concerning the dividing lines between Man, machine and animal. These paradoxes were to push philosophical reflection itself, with Kant, towards the new shores of a moral and pragmatic theory of human nature which was to be characteristic of the whole second part of the modern era and which is richly dealt with in this volume. The same paradoxes had to be faced again with the arrival of Darwinian evolutionary theory, when they had to be integrated with the problems that had arisen in the moral and idealistic thinking of the early 19th century. So by closing with the concept of the “post-human’’, the return of this selection to its starting point perhaps brings us to the point of connection between the two poles around which philosophical reflection on human nature has revolved – nature and spirit – and the culmination of a duality that seems to us to identify and delineate the domain of the human that western thought has been mapping out from the early 17th century until today. Hoping you enjoy the read, we invite you to look forward to the next issue of Azimuth, due in October 2013, dealing with Aesthetics and Politics.