Robert Pasnau

The Cambridge History of Medieval Philosophy comprises over fifty specially commissioned essays by experts on the philosophy of this period. Starting in the late eighth century, with the renewal of learning some centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire, a sequence of chapters takes the reader through developments in many and varied fields, including logic and language, natural philosophy, ethics, metaphysics, and theology. Close attention is paid to the context of medieval philosophy, with discussions of the rise of the universities and developments in the cultural and linguistic spheres. A striking feature is the continuous coverage of Islamic, Jewish, and Christian material. There are useful biographies of the philosophers, and a comprehensive bibliography. The volumes illuminate a rich and remarkable period in the history of philosophy and will be the authoritative source on medieval philosophy for the next generation of scholars and students alike.

Oxford Studies in Medieval Philosophy showcases the best scholarly research in this flourishing field. The series covers all aspects of medieval philosophy, including the Latin, Arabic, and Hebrew traditions, and runs from the end of antiquity into the Renaissance. It publishes new work by leading scholars in the field, and combines historical scholarship with philosophical acuteness. The papers will address a wide range of topics, from political philosophy to ethics, and logic to metaphysics. OSMP is an essential resource for anyone working in the area.

A quick scan of the leading figures in western philosophy reveals that relatively few have made a name for themselves by defending intuitive, natural, and sensible positions. Aristotle is one, and perhaps Aquinas is another. Francisco Suarez, the sixteenth-century Spanish scholastic, would be a third. His invariable working procedure is to give copious consideration to the various ancient and medieval views, and then to find some sensible compromise position. But today Suarez can hardly claim to have a broad readership. Of his fifty-four Metaphysical Disputations, only nine have now been published in English, while his other works remain almost entirely untranslated. This clear and accurate new translation aims to show readers what they have been missing.

Perhaps the most lively area of historical research in philosophy today concerns the scholastic antecedents of modern philosophy. As studies of modern philosophy have become more historically rigorous, over the past twenty years, they have become increasingly concerned with understanding the antecedents to figures such as Descartes and Locke. Of course, inasmuch as these authors were notoriously and proudly ignorant of scholastic thought, it is not to be expected that a better understanding of medieval and Renaissance philosophy will unlock the hidden meaning of modern texts. Still, the very notion that such authors are somehow modern can be defended only on the basis of a decent understanding of their predecessors, something that few modern scholars can claim to have.

This book is a major contribution to the history of philosophy in the later medieval period (1250-1350). It focuses on cognitive theory, a subject of intense investigation during these years. In fact many of the issues that dominate philosophy of mind and epistemology today - intentionality, mental representation, scepticism, realism - were hotly debated in the later medieval period. The book offers a careful analysis of these debates, primarily through the work of Thomas Aquinas, John Olivi, and William Ockham. Each of these figures attempts to reconceptualise cognition along direct realist lines, criticising in the process the standard Aristotelian account. Though of primary interest to medieval philosophers, the book presupposes no background knowledge of the medieval period, and will therefore interest a broader community of philosophers concerned with the origins of contemporary cognitive theory.

Epistemology today centrally concerns the conceptual analysis of knowledge. Historically, however, this is a concept that philosophers have seldom been interested in analysing, particularly when it is construed as broadly as the English language would have it. Instead, the overriding focus of epistemologists over the centuries has been, first, to describe the epistemic ideal that human beings might hope to achieve, and then go on to chart the various ways in which we ordinarily fall off from that ideal. I discuss in detail two historical manifestations of idealized epistemology — Aristotle and Descartes — and then consider how this perspective might make a difference to the discipline today. In the end, an idealized epistemology points toward a normative, prescriptive rather than descriptive enterprise

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 38.1 (2000) 27-40 [Access article in PDF] Sensible Qualities: The Case of Sound Robert Pasnau University of Colorado 1. Background The Aristotelian tradition distinguishes the familiar five external senses from the less familiar internal senses. Aristotle himself did not in fact use this terminology of 'external' and 'internal,' but the division became common in the work of Arab and Hebrew philosophers, and in the Latin West the distinction is taken for granted.1 I am going to put to one side the obscurities involved in the various internal senses of phantasia, imagination, memory, etc.; I will instead focus on the external senses. These five external senses—sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch—have their familiar counterparts in the external world: color, sound, odor, flavor, and the various tangible qualities. (The tangible qualities, unfortunately, resist being reduced to a single genus, and are typically listed as hot and cold, wet and dry, etc., where this etc. stands in for the complete list that one might or might not be able to give.2 ) These sensibilia (I will simply speak of sensibles) were known as the proper or special objects of the external senses.In addition to these proper objects, the senses were taken to have five common objects—size, shape, number, motion, rest—and also an unlimited variety of incidental objects, the per accidens sensibles—Coriscus, one's enemy, a horse race, etc. These per accidens sensibles are in a way the most interesting and important sense objects of all. They are interesting, first, inasmuch as one of the hardest and most interesting problems about perception is the problem of seeing as, which seems to be precisely the phenomenon at issue [End Page 27] here. They are important, also, inasmuch as genuine perception, as we now think of it, almost always involves the perception of something sensible per accidens. Our everyday sensory experiences revolve around the experience of seeing objects of certain kinds. We can of course step back and decide that what we are really seeing is colors and shapes. But that is not how we ordinarily see things.Despite their interest and importance, I want to put aside these per accidens sensibles, and focus instead on the common and proper sensibles, both of which Aristotle described as sensible per se (kath' hauta). In his classic statement on the objects of sensation, at De anima II 6, 418a7-25, Aristotle suggests that the grounds for distinguishing the per se from the per accidens are that the former sensibles are capable in their own right of making an impression on the senses. Color itself affects the external senses, and so does size. Coriscus, however, considered as Coriscus, does no such thing. He affects the senses only inasmuch as he is colored, perfumed, etc.3 To focus on the per se sensibles, then, is to focus on those things in the world that are suited to make impressions on the external senses.Why are some such sensibles proper, whereas others are common? The well-known rule of thumb here, reflected in how we refer to these sensibles, is that each proper sensible can be perceived by only one of the external senses. The common sensibles are those per se sensibles that fail this test. (Note that, of the common sensibles, only number, movement and rest are truly common to all five of the senses; shape and size are perceptible only by touch and sight.4 ) It is not clear, however, that this is the appropriate criterion for distinguishing the proper from the common sensibles. Albert the Great, for instance, argues that a proper sensible must meet three tests: (1) It is sensed by only one sense; (2) this sense is not capable of error with respect to it; and (3) the organ of this sense is naturally suited to be affected by it alone.5 The last of these tests is problematic, however, for at least two reasons. First, it is problematic for touch, given that the tangible qualities resist being reduced to a single genus. Second, more seriously...

A theory of human nature must consider from the start whether it sees human beings in fundamentally biological terms, as animals like other animals, or else in fundamentally supernatural terms, as creatures of God who are like God in some special way, and so importantly unlike other animals. Many of the perennial philosophical disputes have proved so intractable in part because their adherents divide along these lines. The friends of materialism, seeing human beings as just a particularly complex example of the sort of complex organic structure found everywhere on Earth, suppose that we are ultimately constituted out of just the same material from which squirrels and rabbits are made. The friends of dualism, instead, think that such a story can hardly do justice to what is special about human nature. Likewise, the friends of a libertarian, robustly non-deterministic conception of free will see something special in human spontaneity and moral responsibility. To their opponents, human beings operate on the same principles, albeit more complex, as do squid and plankton. These and other such disputes need not divide along religious lines. One may oppose naturalism without embracing a supernatural theistic perspective; one might, for instance, think it simply a matter of fact that human beings are fundamentally unlike other biological organisms, but yet not suppose we are made that way by any higher power. Conversely, the theist may think it part of the divine plan to have made human beings as nothing more than the most complex of biological organisms, constituted out of the same stuff and constrained by the same laws. So although the choice I have described between two perspectives –

Thomas Aquinas gives us many reasons to think that conceptual thought is linguistic in nature. Most notably, he refers to a mental concept as a verbum or word. He further says that such concepts may be either simple or complex, and that complex concepts are formed out of simple ones, through composition or division. These complex concepts may either affirm or deny a predicate of a subject. All of these claims suggest that conceptual thought is somehow language-like. Moreover, Aquinas would have been led in this direction by several venerable traditions. Augustine, for instance, speaks of “the word that we speak in our heart, a word which is not Greek nor Latin nor part of any other language.” And Aristotle, at the beginning of his De interpretatione, says that spoken words are symbols or signs of mental concepts; later generations would take this claim to warrant a treatment of mental concepts as themselves a kind of language. But how exactly should we understand this apparent connection in Aquinas between thought and language?