Dominik Perler

This paper examines Elisabeth of Bohemia’s critique of Descartes’ internalist conception of happiness. According to this conception, we can all become happy because we can all make full use of our rational faculties and constantly follow our best judgments. Happiness is nothing but an “internal satisfaction” that arises when we act in accordance with these judgments. Elisabeth challenges this conception by pointing out that it is far too optimistic and that it neglects what is external to our own mind. Quite often, we cannot make full use of our rational faculties because we are in the grip of passions and diseases or because we are under time pressure and can neither make the best decisions nor foresee their consequences. The paper focuses on these two objections, arguing that Elisabeth replaces Descartes’ internalist conception of happiness with a more complex conception that takes both internal and external factors into account. On her view, not only the right use of our rational faculties but also the right conditions for using them are required for obtaining happiness. In defending this view, Elisabeth presents an alternative to Descartes’ position and should therefore be seen as an original thinker engaging in a philosophical debate.

Die Auseinandersetzung mit Aristoteles und der aristotelischen Tradition war in der frühen Neuzeit geprägt durch eine Spannung zwischen polemischer Ablehnung und impliziter Weiterführung oder gar expliziter Zustimmung. Einerseits setzten sich Bacon, Descartes, Malebranche, Hobbes, Locke und zahlreiche andere ›moderne‹ Philosophen, die von der mechanistischen Physik beeinflusst waren, ganz entschieden von aristotelischen Prinzipien und Erklärungsmodellen ab. Allerdings beschäftigten sie sich kaum mit den Werken des Aristoteles, sondern mit spätscholastischen Kompendien. Daher richtete sich ihre Kritik eher gegen spätmittelalterliche Transformationen oder Verformungen des Aristotelismus als gegen Aristoteles selbst. Andererseits wurden die Schriften des Aristoteles an den Universitäten weiterhin gelesen und kommentiert, und aristotelische Autoren versuchten, Kernstücke der Metaphysik – etwa den Hylemorphismus und die Substanztheorie – gegen die zunehmende Kritik zu verteidigen.

It has often been said that the knowability of substances became a problem in the early modern period, when anti-Aristotelians doubted that we could know anything more than the sensory qualities that are present to us. This article argues that the late scholastic Aristotelian Francisco Suárez was already aware of this sceptical problem. On his view, substances are really (and not just modally) distinct from the perceivable qualities, and therefore cannot be known through sense perception. The article first examines the metaphysical theory that motivated him to defend this thesis. It then looks at the epistemological consequences he drew from it. Though he rejected direct knowledge of substances, he nevertheless conceded that knowledge can be obtained through a “discursive process”. The article explores this process, spelling out all the cognitive steps it involves. In particular, it analyses Suárez's explanation of how we produce special cognitive devices (the “intelligible species”) that enable us to represent substances. Finally, it assesses Suárez's solution to the knowability problem by comparing it to Locke's solution. It argues that metaphysical rationalism led him to posit substances: we need to accept them as active causes and bearers of qualities, although we have no direct access to them.

Deutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie A bimonthly journal of international philosophical research As an open forum for discussion, the German Journal of Philosophy promotes dialogue and communication between different philosophical cultures, transcending any one school of thought. The journal primarily publishes studies that are actively engaged in modern international philosophical discourse and that explore new conceptual approaches. In addition to scholarly papers, essays, interviews, and symposia, the journal publishes discoveries from philosophical archives, discussions, and book critiques.

Ockham developed two theories to explain the intentionality of memory: one theory that takes previously perceived things to be the objects of memory, and another that takes one’s own earlier acts of perceiving to be the objects of memory. This paper examines both theories, paying particular attention to the reasons that motivated Ockham to give up the first theory in favor of the second. It argues that the second theory is to be understood as a theory of double intentionality. At the core of this theory is the thesis that one directly remembers one’s own acts, and indirectly also the objects of these acts. The paper analyzes the cognitive mechanism that makes this double intentionality possible and examines the causal account that Ockham gave for explaining the emergence of acts of remembering. It emphasizes that he accepted nothing more than a causal chain of acts and habits, thereby offering an ontologically parsimonious theory of memory.

Suárez pursues a realist strategy when explaining habits: they are real qualities of the soul, acting as real causes and producing real activities. This chapter analyzes this thesis, examining it within the framework of Suárez’s metaphysics of the soul. It looks at the way he explains the necessity of habits, their generation, their co-operation with faculties, and their gradual changes. It emphasizes that habits are not simply “occult qualities,” as many early modern critics thought, but entities that play an important role. They are powers that make it possible to produce a wide range of activities in a quick and effortless way. Suárez’s realist theory of habits aims at explaining how they produce activities and why they must be accepted as parts of a complex network of psychic powers. A theory dispensing with habits would simply accept the existence of some activities as a brute fact.

Spinoza never discusses the scenario of radical skepticism as it was introduced by Descartes. Why not? This paper argues that he chooses a preventive strategy: instead of taking the skeptical challenge as it is and trying to refute it, he questions the challenge itself and gives a diagnosis of its origin. It is a combination of semantic atomism, dualism and anti-naturalism that gives rise to radical doubts. Spinoza attacks these basic assumptions, opting instead for semantic holism, anti-dualism and naturalism. This crucial shift of basic assumptions prevents radical skepticism from arising. To be sure, local doubts are still possible, but the possibility of global doubt is ruled out. The paper examines this preventive strategy, situating it in the historical context and building a bridge to more recent anti-skeptical strategies.

Perception has been for philosophers in the last few decades an area of compelling interest and intense investigation. In large part, the catalyst for this activity has come from contemporary cognitive science and neuroscience, which has been progressing at an accelerating pace, throwing up new information about the brain and new conceptions of how sensory information is processed and used. These new conceptions offer philosophers opportunities for reconceptualizing the senses—what they tell us, how we use them, and the nature of the knowledge they give us. Today, the philosophy of perception resonates with ideas that had not even been articulated in the 1970s and 1980s. This Handbook is a survey by leading philosophical thinkers of contemporary issues and new thinking in philosophy of perception. It includes sections on the history of the subject, introductions to contemporary issues in the epistemology, ontology, and aesthetics of perception, treatments of the individual sense modalities and of the things we perceive by means of them, and a consideration of how perceptual information is integrated and consolidated. New analytic tools and applications to other areas of philosophy are discussed in depth. Each of the forty-five entries is written by a leading expert, some collaborating with younger figures; each seeks to introduce the reader to a broad range of issues. All contain new ideas on the topic covered; together they are a portrait of the vigour and innovative zeal of a young field. The book is accessible to anybody who has an intellectual interest in issues concerning perception.

All medieval philosophers agreed that emotions ought to be controlled by reason, but they gave different accounts of the control that is possible. Aquinas took emotions to be sensory states that are under immediate rational control because both sensory and rational states are produced by a single soul. By contrast, Ockham distinguished two souls and two types of emotions, namely sensory ones that inevitably arise, and rational ones that can be changed by the will. This chapter examines the mechanisms of control in both cases, paying particular attention to the metaphysical framework the two authors chose. Moreover, it looks at the way they dealt with cases of internal emotional conflict. Whereas Aquinas ruled out permanent conflict in a well-functioning soul, Ockham conceded that some rational emotions could coexist with opposing sensory emotions, thus agreeing that true conflict is possible.

All medieval philosophers in the Aristotelian tradition agreed that the human intellect is not only able to know other things, but also itself. But how should that be possible? Which cognitive mechanisms are required for self-knowledge? This chapter examines three models that attempted to answer this fundamental question: (i) Thomas Aquinas referred to higher-order acts that make first-order acts and eventually also the intellect itself cognitively present, (ii) Matthew of Aquasparta appealed to introspection, (iii) Dietrich of Freiberg claimed that no special cognitive process is necessary because the intellect is by nature always fully present to itself. An analysis of these three models shows that scholastic philosophers intended to provide an epistemological foundation for the explanation of Socratic self-knowledge.

This chapter explains the commitment to fundamental metaphysical claims that distinguishes various ways of examining the mind in the period between 1300 and 1600. It examines the functions of the soul, whereas the second analyzes them insofar as they are present in a living animal. Psychology as a special field of investigation was developed in the modern period; not until the late nineteenth century did it emerge as an independent discipline that was institutionally recognized as a branch of science. In 1255 Aristotle's writings in natural philosophy officially became part of the curriculum at the University of Paris. The Aristotelian program of a science of the soul was continued and elaborated by many philosophers throughout the late medieval period. From a methodological point of view, it is remarkable that Montaigne does not refrain from presenting a theory about the soul simply because he has given up every philosophical ambition and confines himself to telling anecdotes and talking about personal experiences.

Aquinas holds that human beings perceive material objects in a rational way, since their sensory faculty is always under the guidance of the rational faculty. This paper intends to shed light on this fundamental thesis. First, it examines the metaphysical background, focusing on Aquinas’s claim that there is just one soul with interconnected, hierarchically ordered faculties. Second, it looks at the interconnection in the case of perception, paying particular attention to the vis cogitativa. This special power, which can only be found in human beings, belongs to the sensory faculty but is always guided by the rational faculty and produces perceptions that are conceptually structured: it enables human beings to see something as something. Third, the paper builds a bridge to recent theories of “transformative rationality.” Like the advocates of this theory, Aquinas claims that rationality is not simply added to sensory activity, but rather something that is present in every act of human perception.

It has often been said that we should enter into a dialogue with thinkers of the past because they discussed they same problems we still have today and presented sophisticated solutions to them. I argue that this “dialogue model” ignores the specific context in which many problems were created and defined. A closer look at various contexts enables us to see that philosophical problems are not as natural as they might seem. When we contextualize them, we experience a healthy alienation effect: we realise that problems discussed in the past depend on assumptions that are far from being self-evident. When we then compare these assumptions to our own, we reflect on our own theoretical framework that is not self-evident either. This leads to a denaturalisation of philosophical problems – in the past as well as in the present. I argue for this thesis by examining late medieval discussions on mental language.

Das Problem des Selbstwissens wird nicht erst in der gegenwartigen Philosophie des Geistes kontrovers diskutiert. Bereits im Spatmittelalter gab es eine intensive Debatte daruber, ob und wie der menschliche Geist Wissen von sich selbst und seinen eigenen Akten und Zustanden haben kann. Der vorliegende Band macht erstmals zentrale Texte in einer zweisprachigen Ausgabe zuganglich. Einfuhrungen zu den jeweiligen Autoren und ihren Texten bieten Interpretationshilfen und ermoglichen sowohl einen historischen als auch einen systematischen Zugang zu der scholastischen Debatte. Die Bandbreite der verschiedenen Positionen wird anhand von Texten so unterschiedlicher Autoren wie Thomas von Aquin, Petrus Johannis Olivi, Roger Marston, Thomas Sutton, Matthaus von Aquasparta, Heinrich von Gent, Dietrich von Freiberg, Wilhelm von Ockham, Walter Chatton und Johannes Buridan prasentiert.

Gr.-8°, Ln. m. SU. XIII, 342 S. Neuwertiges Ex. / Fine Copy // Descartes` Ideentheorie ist in der neueren Forschung immer wieder als Ausgangspunkt des neuzeitlichen "way of ideas" dargestellt worden, der in einen verhängnisvollen Repräsentationalismus mündet. Denn Cartesische Ideen scheinen so etwas wie mentale Objekte in einer "inneren Arena" zu sein. Da wir nur zu diesen mentalen Objekten einen unmittelbaren Zugang haben, können wir höchstens auf die Existenz äußerer Objekte schließen, wir können sie aber nie unmittelbar erkennen. Stets sind wir in unserer inneren Arena gefangen. Gegen diese weit verbreitete Auffassung argumentiert diese Studie, daß Descartes` Ideentheorie im Rahmen einer Theorie der Intentionalität zu verstehen ist: Ideen sind nichts anderes als intentionale Akte, die im Normalfall auf äußere Objekte gerichtet sind und diese Objekte zum Inhalt haben. In der Cartesischen Ontologie gibt es keinen Platz für mysteriöse innere Objekte, die sich gleichsam zwischen den Geist und die äußeren Objekte schieben. Freilich stellen sich dann sogleich die Fragen, (i) wie geistige Akte überhaupt auf Objekte gerichtet sein können, (ii) wie der Inhalt dieser Akte zu bestimmen ist und (iii) wie wir mittels intentionaler Akte eine korrekte Erkenntnis der Außenwelt gewinnen können. Diesen Fragen geht die Studie in ausführlichen Text- und Argumentationsanalysen nach. Sie verdeutlicht, daß im Zentrum der Cartesischen Lehre die These steht, daß wir ganz bestimmte Ideen - nämlich klare und distinkte - benötigen, um wahre Urteile über die äußeren Objekte bilden zu können. Dabei wird die Cartesische Theorie einerseits im historischen Kontext dargestellt, andererseits werden aber auch Bezüge zur gegenwärtigen analytischen Diskussion hergestellt.

Die Intentionalitätsproblematik steht nicht nur im Mittelpunkt der heutigen philosophischen und kognitionstheoretischen Debatten. Sie wurde bereits im Mittelalter scharfsinnig diskutiert, ja die scholastischen Autoren prägten als Erste die Fachausdrücke "Intentionalität" und "intentionale Existenz" und entwarfen verschiedene Modelle, um das Rätsel der kognitiven Bezugnahme zu lösen. Dieses Buch stellt fünf einflußreiche Intentionalitätsmodelle vor, die im 13. und 14. Jahrhundert entstanden sind. Dabei werden so unterschiedliche Autoren wie Thomas von Aquin, Petrus Johannes Olivi, Dietrich von Freiberg, Johannes Duns Scotus, Petrus Aureoli, Hervaeus Natalis, Wilhelm von Ockham und Adam Wodeham berücksichtigt. "Die anschauliche und präzise Art, in der Perler mit den Denkern des Mittelalters und der Gegenwart argumentierend spricht, lockert seine gestrenge Gedankenarbeit auf, ohne darüber hinwegzutäuschen, daß dieses Buch eine Reihe von Entdeckungen und Klärungen enthält, wie sie auf diesem schwierigen Feld selten vorkommen. Er bietet eine Meisterleistung an Konzentration und Darstellungskunst. Wenige Bücher zur Philosophie des Mittelalters vereinen so glücklich wie dieses geschichtlichen Takt und Problemsinn." Kurt Flasch The problem of intentionality is not only at the centre of today's philosophical and cognitive theory debates. It was already discussed astutely in the Middle Ages; indeed the scholastic authors were the first to coin the technical terms "intentionality" and "intentional existence" and designed various models to solve the riddle of cognitive reference. This book presents five influential models of intentionality that emerged in the 13th and 14th centuries. It takes into account authors as different as Thomas Aquinas, Petrus Johannes Olivi, Dietrich von Freiberg, Johannes Duns Scotus, Petrus Aureoli, Hervaeus Natalis, Wilhelm von Ockham and Adam Wodeham. Upun reading this book, Kurt Flasch remarks that it "contains a wealth of discoveries and clarifications that are rare in this difficult field. [Perler] offers a masterly performance of concentration and art of representation [...]. Few books on medieval philosophy succeed so thoroughly in uniting historical and philosophical perspicacity such as this one".

Was ist eine menschliche Person? Durch welche besonderen Eigenschaften zeichnet sie sich aus? Und wodurch unterscheidet sie sich von einem blossen Lebewesen? Mittelalterliche Autoren widmeten sich mit viel Scharfsinn diesen Fragen, indem sie sich auf drei Dimensionen einer Person konzentrierten. Sie setzten bei der metaphysischen Dimension an, indem sie eine Person als eine individuelle Substanz mit einer rationalen Natur bestimmten. Dies fuhrte sie dazu, diese Substanz genauer zu untersuchen: ihre wesentlichen Bestandteile, ihre Einheit und ihre Identitat uber die Zeit hinweg. Sie beschaftigten sich aber auch mit der psychologischen Dimension, indem sie die Reflexionsfahigkeit als die entscheidende geistige Fahigkeit einer Person analysierten. Zudem berucksichtigten sie die handlungstheoretische Dimension, indem sie festhielten, dass eine Person im Gegensatz zu einem blossen Lebewesen Handlungen hervorbringen kann. Sie betonten sogar, dass sich eine Person frei fur Handlungen entscheiden kann und daher fur sie verantwortlich ist. Dieses Buch, das sich auf Theorien des 13. und 14. Jahrhunderts konzentriert, rekonstruiert die Debatten zu allen drei Dimensionen im historischen Kontext, wertet sie systematisch aus und schlagt dabei auch einen Bogen zu fruhneuzeitlichen und gegenwartigen Diskussionen. Es verdeutlicht, dass im Mittelalter die Grundlagen fur eine philosophische Anthropologie gelegt wurden.

Like many philosophers in the scholastic tradition, Suárez claims that we cannot cognize anything unless we use a cognitive device, a so-called intelligible species. But how can we produce such a device? And what kind of cognition does it make possible? This chapter examines these questions, paying particular attention to Suárez’s rejection of traditional theories that explained the production of intelligible species by referring to efficient causation. On his view, there can only be a relation of occasional causation: the existence of sensory images is simply an occasion for the intellect to produce intelligible species. This chapter first analyzes this type of causation and then looks at the function of the species. It argues that species are inner representations that make particular things cognitively present. In presenting this view, Suárez breaks with a long tradition that took species to be the product of a process of assimilation of universal forms and paves the way for early modern theories of representation.

Historians of philosophy often credit Descartes, Locke, and other seventeenth-century authors with having introduced one of the most vexing problems into epistemology: the problem of mental representations. For these authors claimed that our knowledge of the external world is always mediated by mental representations, so that we have immediate access only to these representations, the ideas in our mind. As is well known, this “veil-of-ideas epistemology” gave rise to a number of skeptical questions. How can we be certain that our ideas are accurate representations of the external world? And how can we be sure that there is an external world at all if we never have immediate access to it? In his highly original and provocative study, Robert Pasnau argues that these questions are not distinctively modern. They were already asked and thoroughly discussed by medieval authors: “much of what is often taken to be novel in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was already old news by the fourteenth”. According to Pasnau, it was Thomas Aquinas who introduced some form of representationalism into epistemology by developing the species-theory, and it was first Peter John Olivi and later William Ockham who attacked this theory, insisting that we always have immediate cognitive access to the external world.

Abstrakt zum Buch Welche Fragen haben die großen Denker beschäftigt? Wie haben sich die Fragestellungen weiterentwickelt? Und aus welchen Gründen sind diese klassischen Fragestellungen und Texte für uns heute noch interessant? Diesen Fragen geht der 2004 erstmals im Hardcover veröffentlichte Band nach. Die vollständig durchgesehene Neuausgabe in der Universal-Bibliothek wurde um Abschnitte zu Plotin (»Woher kommt das Böse?«), John Rawls (»Gerechtigkeit für eine pluralistische Gesellschaft«), Donald Davidson (»Bedeutung und Interpretation«) und Jacques Derrida (»Sinn, Schrift und Differenz«) erweitert. Nach oben

Many late medieval Aristotelians assumed that a natural substance has several substantial forms in addition to matter as really distinct parts. This assumption gave rise to a unity problem: why is a substance more than a conglomeration of all these parts? This paper discusses Francisco Suárez’s answer. It first shows that he rejected the idea that there is a plurality of forms, emphasizing instead that each substance has a single form and hence a single structuring principle. It then examines his account of the relationship between matter and form. While accepting the thesis that these two parts are really distinct entities, he claimed that there is a special “mode of union” that binds them together. With this account, he defended the essential unity of a natural substance, but he transformed the program of Aristotelian metaphysics: not substances, but entities and modes inside them, are now the basic building blocks of reality.

The notion of idea is a key concept in early modern philosophy. From Descartes seminal works at the beginning of the 17th century to the work of Thomas Reid in the closing years of the 18th century, discussion in theoretical philosophy is dominated by the debate about the core concept of idea. This two-volume textbook introduces eleven key authors from this period. The first volume presents the central texts in modern translation, often new translations based on the source texts. The second volume contains commentaries on each text with a systematic introduction, a line-by-line commentary and a contextualisation of the contents. Thus this textbook provides students of philosophy with a comprehensive overview of the modern discussion of the concept of idea. "

Early modern philosophers took the phenomena of causation and cognition to be closely related. United in their opposition to Aristotelian accounts of cognition, they developed a wide range of competing theories to explain which causal processes lead to cognitions. Somewhat surprisingly, some early modern authors also made cognition a requirement for causation, on the assumption that every cause needs to cognize its effect. This introductory chapter explores both directions of explanation—from causation to cognition and vice versa—and surveys the various early modern approaches to causation and cognition.

This book re-examines the roles of causation and cognition in early modern philosophy. The standard historical narrative suggests that early modern thinkers abandoned Aristotelian models of formal causation in favor of doctrines that appealed to relations of efficient causation between material objects and cognizers. This narrative has been criticized in recent scholarship from at least two directions. Scholars have emphasized that we should not think of the Aristotelian tradition in such monolithic terms, and that many early modern thinkers did not unequivocally reduce all causation to efficient causation. In line with this general approach, this book features original essays written by leading experts in early modern philosophy. It is organized around five guiding questions: What are the entities involved in causal processes leading to cognition? What type(s) or kind(s) of causality are at stake? Are early modern thinkers confined to efficient causation or do other types of causation play a role? What is God's role in causal processes leading to cognition? How do cognitive causal processes relate to other, non-cognitive causal processes? Is the causal process in the case of human cognition in any way special? How does it relate to processes involved in the case of non-human cognition? The essays explore how fifteen early modern thinkers answered these questions: Francisco Suárez, René Descartes, Louis de la Forge, Géraud de Cordemoy, Nicolas Malebranche, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch de Spinoza, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Ralph Cudworth, Margaret Cavendish, John Locke, John Sergeant, George Berkeley, David Hume, and Thomas Reid. The volume is unique in that it explores both well-known and understudied historical figures, and in that it emphasizes the intimate relationship between causation and cognition to open up new perspectives on early modern philosophy of mind and metaphysics.

Medieval Aristotelians assumed that we cannot assimilate forms unless our soul abstracts them from sensory images. But what about the disembodied soul that has no senses and hence no sensory images? How can it assimilate forms? This article discusses this problem, focusing on two thirteenth-century models. It first looks at Thomas Aquinas’ model, which invokes divine intervention: the separated soul receives forms directly from God. The article examines the problems this explanatory model poses and then turns to a second model, defended by Matthew of Aquasparta: the separated soul actively apprehends forms that are present to it. It will be argued that this model explains assimilation in terms of appropriation, rather than reception, of forms and thereby radically changes the traditional account of cognition. Finally, the article draws some methodological conclusions, arguing that the focus on the ‘limit case’ of separated souls made theoretical change possible.

Vivarium (VIV) is an international journal dedicated to the history of philosophy and intellectual life from the early Middle Ages to the early modern era. It is widely recognized as an unrivalled resource for the history of logic, semantics, epistemology, and metaphysics. It welcomes articles on medieval, Renaissance and early-modern thinkers, their ideas, arguments, and writings, as well as the institutional and intellectual life of this period. Editions of texts as brief appendices to the main articles may be added. Articles on early-modern philosophy are welcome if they link it with the medieval and Renaissance traditions. Articles on Arabic and Jewish thought are welcome if there is a clear connection with the Latin tradition. Vivarium also publishes regularly special issues devoted to a particular theme or philosopher.