Timothy Brian Noone

In this second revised edition of his now classic history of thirteenth-century philosophy, the late Canon Van Steenberghen has given philosophers and historians of philosophy a masterful restatement of his fundamental outlook on thirteenth-century philosophy. Drawing upon the research of a lifetime and fully cognizant of recent contributions to the field, Van Steenberghen defends in a combative and engaging style the soundness of his interpretations and his historical categorizations, while tracing the development of thirteenth-century thought in a series of chapters devoted to its chief figures and movements. Although one may question his method of organizing parts of thirteenth-century philosophy or his reading of a given philosophical author or movement, the erudition of the author, prominently displayed in his command of the primary and secondary literature bearing on each topic treated, is probably unmatched by any living historian of medieval philosophy.

This lecture treats the theme of habitual cognition in both its commonplace and unusual senses in the tradition of ancient and medieval philosophy. Beginning with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and its teaching on habits, it traces how the ancient and medieval Peripatetic tradition received and developed the idea of habitual knowledge. The lecture then turns to three case-studies in which the notion of habitual knowledge is used in unusual senses: Aquinas’s treatment of self-knowledge; Scotus’s account of human awareness of the concept of being; and Peter Auriol’s observations regarding memory and subconscious awareness in ordinary reptitive acts. Aquinas and Scotus seem to identify habitual knowledge in its unusual sense with the presence of an intelligible in the mind prior to actual cognition of that object. Auriol extends habitual knowledge to cover the cognitive state of someone performing an act without any conscious attention. The uses by both Aquinas and Scotus seem somewhat parallel to the use of habit or pre-conscious knowledge in Hume and Kant.

Timothy B. Noone - The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 258-259 Book Review The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century Steven P. Marrone. The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century. 2 Vols. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Pp. x + 611. Cloth, $90.00. In this, the most complete study of the tradition of divine illumination ever produced in English, Steven Marrone has set the standard for further studies in thirteenth-century epistemology as well as inaugurated a revival in the historiographical significance of philosophical schools for analyzing medieval thought. He conducts his investigation of thirteenth-century epistemology by focusing upon eleven figures seen as belonging..