James South

Medieval philosophy is the collective name given to the philosophies of thinkers who lived between the end of the Roman Empire, c. 400, and the beginning of the modern era, c. 1490. The philosophers profiled in DLB Volume 115 were involved in education, public life and ecclesiastical administration, and thus represent the various schools of thought that existed throughout this vast period. This volume offers much new information on these scholars, and fills the gap in available literature. The entries, containing biographies, bibliographies and beliefs of the philosophers, reflect the most recent developments in the field.

It's time to pick up your fedora and embark on a philosophical journey through Discworld! Terry Pratchett is world-famous for the narrative verve and surreal humour of his novels. But now meet another Terry Pratchett – a man of serious metaphysical ideas and sophisticated philosophical insights. In Philosophy and Terry Pratchett thirteen professional philosophers survey such key philosophical issues as personal identity, the nature of destiny, the value of individuality, the meaning of existentialism, the reality of universals and the existence of alternative realities. In considering these and many other equally fascinating themes, close reference is made to more than 35 Discworld novels as well as to the ideas of some of history's greatest philosophers including Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Rawls. During your journey, you will be surprised by numerous provocative conclusions including the startling claim that the existence of Discworld is logically possible!

Zabarella and the Intentionality of Sensation - ABSTRACT: In this paper, I examine Zabarella’s account of the intentionality of sensation. By looking at both his account of the production of the sensible species as well as proper activity of the human soul in the process of sensation, I show that he has carefully reinterpreted standard medieval theories of sensation. Most notably, his account of intentionality as a kind of mental attention seems to point towards a type of Cartesian dualism, but at the same time attempts to remain faithful to the basic insights of the Aristotelian tradition concerning sensation.

It is acknowledged that Francisco Suarez had an excellent knowledge of the Medieval Scholastic tradition. In this project, I focus on one topic, human knowledge of material singulars, to determine Suarez's debt to and freedom from the Scholastic tradition. The representative thinkers of the Medieval tradition that I consider are Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham. ;In the first two Chapters, I consider the accounts of John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham on the issue of knowledge of singulars. I show that both Scotus and Ockham try to distance themselves from the analysis of indirect knowledge of material singulars presented by Aquinas. Although Scotus retains the notion that the universal nature is the first object of the intellect, his stress on the autonomy of the intellect in its relation to sense cognition paved the way for Ockham. Notably, Ockham rejects any account of knowledge that requires intermediary representational species, and consequently adopts a position that stresses the intellect's ability to know singulars directly via intuitive cognition. ;In the final two Chapters, I discuss in detail Suarez's account of knowledge of material singulars. I show that Suarez accepts Ockham's basic arguments for the priority of knowledge of the singular but at the same time retains the necessity of intelligible species. His account of the relationship between sense cognition and intellectual cognition owes some debt to Scotus, but Suarez accents the theme of the autonomy of the intellect to an extremely high degree. Furthermore, he rejects Ockham's account of intuitive cognition, positing instead a theory of cognition that requires representational species at every step in the cognitive process, both sensory and intellectual. Consequently, Suarez presents us with a highly nuanced and extremely consistent account of knowledge that leaves no explanatory "gaps."

The sixteenth-century philosopher Jacopo Zabarella stands near the end of the long Aristotelian dominance of western academic philosophy. Yet, despite the fact that Aristotelianism was soon to be overwhelmed by other currents of thought, Zabarella’s influence on western thought would continue into at least the nineteenth century, and he still provides useful discussions relevant to today’s Aristotle scholars. In what follows, I discuss the existence and essence of matter, and show how Zabarella argues for his claims. What is especially notable about the existence and essence of matter as a topic is that matter is clearly at the center of his well-known interest concerning the nature of scientific methodology.