Jack Zupko

John Buridan uses the concepts of actus and habitus in his psychology to explain the difference between actual or occurrent thoughts and the dispositions to think those same thoughts. But since mental qualities are immaterial, Buridan must finesse his account of material qualities to save the psychological phenomena. He argues that thoughts and dispositions are really distinct from the human soul and from each other, and that because a thought and its corresponding disposition are different kinds of quality, we cannot say that they differ merely in terms of intensity. This leaves him with the unresolved problem of explaining how one kind of psychological quality can be caused by another that is qualitatively distinct from it.

Peter Abelard (1079–1142 ce) was the most wide‐ranging philosopher of the twelfth century. He quickly established himself as a leading teacher of logic in and near Paris shortly after 1100. After his affair with Heloise, and his subsequent castration, Abelard became a monk, but he returned to teaching in the Paris schools until 1140, when his work was condemned by a Church Council at Sens. His logical writings were based around discussion of the “Old Logic”: Porphyry's Isagoge, aristotle'S Categories and On Interpretation and boethius'S textbook on topical inference. They comprise a freestanding Dialectica (“Logic”; probably c.1116), a set of commentaries (known as the Logica [Ingredientibus], c. 1119) and a later (c. 1125) commentary on the Isagoge (Logica Nostrorum Petititoni Sociorum or Glossulae). In a work Abelard called his Theologia, issued in three main versions (between 1120 and c.1134), he attempted a logical analysis of trinitarian relations and explored the philosophical problems surrounding God's claims to omnipotence and omniscience. The Collationes (“Debates,” also known as “Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher and a Jew”; probably c.1130) present a rational investigation into the nature of the highest good, in which the Christian and the Philosopher (who seems to be modeled on a philosopher of pagan antiquity) are remarkably in agreement. The unfinished Scito teipsum (“Know thyself,” also known as the “Ethics”; c.1138) analyses moral action.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Rudolf A. Makkreel 1936-2021Jack Zupko, Former Editor, Journal of the History of PhilosophyRudi Makkreel, longtime editor (1983–98) of the Journal of the History of Philosophy and President of its Board of Directors (1998–2018), died October 2021 in Atlanta, GA, of complications from ALS.Rudi was one of the foremost Kant scholars of his generation, helping to bring the Critique of Judgment into the broader currency it enjoys among philosophers today. He also made important contributions to the fields of aesthetics, hermeneutics, and the philosophy of history. His Dilthey, Philosopher of the Human Studies (Princeton, 1975; 2nd edition, 1992), nominated for both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award, introduced the thought of Wilhelm Dilthey to the anglophone world, explaining the significance of Dilthey’s work on the social and cultural dimensions of human experience as well as its influence on early analytic philosophers such as Carnap. With Frithjof Rodi, he completed the six-volume Wilhelm Dilthey: Selected Works (Princeton, 1985–2019), an enduring legacy for students and historians of German philosophy of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Rudi was born in Antwerp, Belgium in 1939. He immigrated to the United States in 1951 and completed his graduate studies in philosophy at Columbia University in 1966. He taught at the University of California, San Diego until 1973, after which he joined the faculty at Emory University, his academic home as Charles Howard Candler Professor of Philosophy for almost half a century. He was a native Dutch speaker, but equally at home in both English and German, always exemplifying for his students the importance of knowing the original languages of the philosophers one is researching.Rudi was not just a scholar’s scholar but a perceptive critic and outstanding teacher, as his many students in academic positions around the world can attest. As a colleague he was unfailingly supportive, in his gentle and softly spoken way, quietly putting opportunities in the path of younger historians of philosophy. He was committed to ensuring the Emory philosophy program remained solidly grounded in the history of philosophy, with faculty expertise in all of its canonical areas. He was dedicated to his students and to serving the profession through the JHP, guiding the work of its Board of Directors and providing invaluable advice (though only when asked) to later Editors.Rudi took over editorship of the JHP at a tumultuous time in its history; he brought stability to its operations and ensured that the JHP remained a “big tent” in the field, publishing research on all figures, movements, and periods in the history of western philosophy, by scholars with a variety of philosophical styles and research methods. This meant making room for original papers on understudied figures and topics, despite the pressure to publish the best work on better-known figures and more traditional or popular topics, with which he could have easily filled each issue.He leaves behind his wife, Frances, a daughter, Karen, and a grandchild, as well as many former students and colleagues, who miss his gentle demeanor, wry sense of humor, and penetrating intellect.Jack Zupko, Former Editor, Journal of the History of PhilosophyUniversity of AlbertaCopyright © 2023 Journal of the History of Philosophy, Inc....

John Buridan was the most famous philosophy teacher of his time, and probably the most influential. In this important new book, Jack Zupko offers the first systematic exposition of Buridan's thought to appear in any language. Zupko uses Buridan's own conception of the order and practice of philosophy to depict the most salient features of his thought, beginning with his views on the nature of language and logic and then illustrating their application to a series of topics in metaphysics, natural philosophy, and ethics. Part 1 of John Buridan considers the picture of language and logic developed in Buridan's Summulae de dialectica. Buridan systematically overhauled the logic he first learned and later taught at the University of Paris, redeeming the older tradition of Aristotelian logic in terms, propositions, and arguments. This made possible newer and more powerful forms of philosophical discourse. The second part of this volume provides a reading of Buridan's philosophy, showing how this discourse shaped his treatment of speculative questions such as the relation between soul and body, the nature of knowledge, the proper subject of psychology, the function of the.

with the publication in this issue of Alice Ragni's "Bibliographia Claubergiana : Tracking a Crossroads in the History of Philosophy," we inaugurate a new series in the JHP, Research Tools for Historians of Philosophy. This series will publish occasional article-length studies that serve as resources for philosophers who do primary text scholarship: bibliographies, catalogs of manuscripts and correspondence, information about libraries and research collections, editions of previously unpublished sources, translations of sources previously unavailable in major European languages, and so on. In the queue for volume 58 next year is an inventory of the correspondence of Elisabeth of...

The JHP Board of Directors awards an annual prize of $5,000 for the best book in the history of philosophy published in the previous year. On the Board's behalf, I am pleased to announce that the winner of the prize for 2019 is Richard T. W. Arthur's Monads, Composition, and Force: Ariadnean Threads Through Leibniz's Labyrinth.The JHP Board of Directors also awards an annual prize of $1,500 for the best contribution to the Articles section of the Journal. On the Board's behalf, I am pleased to announce that the winners of the fifteenth annual prize are Jessica Moss and Whitney Schwab for "The Birth of Belief," JHP 57.1 : 1–32, with an Honorable Mention going to...

This dissertation is a philosophical study of Book III of John Buridan's Quaestiones super librum De anima Aristotelis secundum tertiam lecturam, the revised text of the last of Buridan's lectures on Aristotle's De anima. ;The dissertation contains four parts. Part One is an edition of the previously unedited Latin text of Book III of the tertia lectura of Buridan's Quaestiones De anima, constructed from four manuscripts: Vat. lat. 2164, Vat. lat. 11575, Vat. Reg. lat. 1959, and Codex Vindobonensis Pal. 5454. Part Two is an English translation of the text edited in Part One. Part Three is a philosophical commentary keyed to individual passages in the text and translation, providing brief explanations of some of the arguments and doctrines employed therein. Part Four is a more extended treatment of some metaphysical and epistemological issues raised by Buridan's psychology. ;Part Four consists of three chapters. In Chapter One, I argue that Buridan's account of universal cognition threatens to compromise his nominalistic ontology because he cannot explain the universality of concepts without appealing to such ontologically-suspect notions as 'natures', 'likenesses', and 'essential agreement'. Part of the problem is that he is ill-served by the model of intellectual abstraction he inherits from Aristotle and Aquinas. I suggest a revision of this model along Berkeleian lines that is more in keeping with Buridan's nominalism. ;Chapter Two discusses the relation between Buridan's theory of cognition and how we come to know that sensible particulars exist, and that the principles and conclusions of demonstrative science are true. I argue that the psychological mechanism by which Buridan claims we are directly acquainted with sensible particulars is unreliable, and that his attempt to show that we can be more than inductively certain of scientific truths looks too ad hoc to be plausible. ;Chapter Three considers how Buridan's theory of knowledge fares against skeptical doubt. I argue that despite first appearances, it is never Buridan's intention to reply to the skeptic, although he says too little about the justification of knowledge to satisfy even ordinary rational inquiries into how we know, let alone skeptical doubts