Robert Pasnau

It is important to distinguish between two ways in which God might be timelessly eternal: eternality as being wholly outside of time, versus the sort of timelessness that consists in lacking temporal parts, and so existing “all at once.” A prominent but neglected historical tradition, most clearly evident in Anselm, advocates putting God in time, but in an all-at-once sort of way that makes God immune to temporal change. This is an intrinsically plausible conception of divine eternality, which also sheds light on the modern dispute over the endurance or perdurance of material objects.

The third volume of The Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts will allow scholars and students access in English, to major texts that form the debate over mind and knowledge at the center of medieval philosophy. Beginning with thirteenth-century attempts to classify the soul's powers and to explain the mind's place within the soul, the volume proceeds systematically to consider the scope of human knowledge and the role of divine illumination, intentionality and mental representation, and attempts to identify the object of human knowledge in terms of concepts and propositions. The authors included are Henry of Ghent, Peter John Olivi, William Alnwick, Peter Aureol, William Ockham, William Crathorn, Robert Holcot, Adam Wodeham as well as two anonymous Parisian masters of arts. This volume will be an important resource for scholars and students of medieval philosophy, history, theology and literature.

Controversy over the epistemology of disagreement endures because there is an unnoticed factor at work: the intrinsic value we give to self-trust. Even if there are many instances of disagreement where, from a strictly epistemic or rational point of view, we ought to suspend belief, there are other values at work that influence our all-things considered judgments about what we ought to believe. Hence those who would give equal-weight to both sides in many cases of disagreement may be right, from the perspective of pure rationality. But their critics are right too, in seeing something undesirable in the consequences of giving equal weight. Among epistemologists, there is a tendency to set aside trust and other such non-epistemic factors, on the grounds that these are not germane to their topic. But ultimately, the value of self-trust shows signs of encroaching on the strictly epistemic question of when our beliefs may be said to be justified. Hence again, even if the equal-weighters are right about what is rational, they may be wrong about what knowledge requires.

In a recent book, I attempt to use the metaphysics of Thomas Aquinas to defend a moderate view regarding abortion: that an abortion at any time during a pregnancy should be considered a grave loss, but that it should be considered murder only after roughly the middle of the second trimester. John Haldane and Patrick Lee contend that I have misunderstood the implications of Aquinas's view, and that in fact his metaphysics supports the conclusion that a human being comes into existence at the moment of conception. In this paper, I make a brief reply.

This volume collects thirteen papers by Robert Audi on action theory, all but two previously published, and dating back as far as the early 1970s. The reader should not be misled by the book's publicity, which proclaims that we are being given "for the first time... a full version of his [Audi's] theory of... human action". Despite such claims, this volume is no more than a collection of papers, and consequently it does not offer the depth and continuity one would expect from a book-length treatment. Still, this is a collection of very fine papers, and collectively they constitute an important and influential theory of action.

Reply to NormoreCalvin Normore offers a very interesting big-picture thesis about the later medieval period, one with multiple components. First, he thinks the first quarters of the thirteenth century—the era of Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas—are “gobsmacked” by the recovery of Aristotle’s work, and hence are “anomalous.” Second he thinks that, once the gobsmacking is over, the philosophers—beginning with Peter John Olivi and onward into the fourteenth century—return to “building upon the insights of the twelfth century”—that is, back to the era of Peter Abelard and others. Third, he thinks that this broader movement—what one gets if one sets aside the anomaly of Thomas Aquinas and his era—is characterized by a broader interest in the whole spectrum of ancient philosophical traditions, so that it is not just Aristotelian, but also Platonic and Stoic and Epicurean and much else. Fourth, this broadening movement sees its culmination in the seventeenth century, when the authority of

The story Wippel tells in this brief but valuable volume is a familiar one, of how the early medieval consensus on the relationship between faith and reason collapsed in the thirteenth century under siege from radical Aristotelians at the University of Paris. Wippel gives his account in clear terms especially well suited to beginning students. Although there are few novelties in this volume, everything is based on the most up-to-date research, and a third of the volume consists of detailed notes that will be the most valuable resource here for scholars already familiar with the basic story.

Philosophers today have largely given up on the project of categorizing being. Aristotle’s ten categories now strike us as quaint, and no attempt to improve on that effort meets with much interest. Still, no one supposes that reality is smoothly distributed over space. The world at large comes in chunks, and there remains a widespread intuition, even among philosophers, that some of these chunks have a special sort of unity and persistence. These, we tend to suppose, are most truly agents and subjects, and are what exist in the most proper sense of the term. We believe, in other words, in substances.

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.

The secondary qualities are those qualities of objects that bear a certain relation to our sensory powers: roughly, they are those qualities that we can readily detect only through a certain distinctive phenomenal experience. Contrary to what is sometimes supposed, there is nothing about the world itself (independent of our minds) that determines the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. Instead, a theory of the secondary qualities must be grounded in facts about how we conceive of these qualities, and ultimately in facts about human perception.