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2Buridan’s Life, Works, and InfluenceIn John Buridan, Oxford University Press. 2009.The first chapter presents a brief summary of the little we know about Buridan’s life, and the somewhat more we know about his immediate historical influence. But this brief survey of known facts only sets up the main argument of the chapter intending to show Buridan’s “modernity” in more than one sense of the word. Buridan is “modern” in the medieval sense, being “the great architect” of what would become in late-medieval philosophy the nominalist via moderna, but he is also “modern” from our p…Read more
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2The Semantics of PropositionsIn John Buridan, Oxford University Press. 2009.This chapter provides a systematic discussion of Buridan’s nominalist semantics of propositions and sentential nominalizations. The chapter argues that despite its incompleteness, Buridan’s theory is still “nominalism’s best shot” at a semantics of propositions without buying into a philosophically and theologically dubious ontology of dicta, enuntiabilia, complexe significabilia, real propositions, or states of affairs.
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1Buridan’s AntiskepticismIn John Buridan, Oxford University Press. 2009.This chapter compares the modern reliabilist strategies, including Buridan’s antiskepticism, considered in the previous chapter with a premodern form of antiskepticism, exemplified by Aquinas’s doctrine of “the formal unity of the knower and the known”, which, as the chapter argues, simply does not allow the emergence of “Demon-skepticism.” In fact, the chapter further argues that the emergence of “Demon-skepticism“ in its most extreme form, allowing an impossibility to appear as a possibility, …Read more
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1The Possibility of Scientific KnowledgeIn John Buridan, Oxford University Press. 2009.This chapter provides a brief survey of Buridan’s reliabilist epistemology, contrasting it with skeptical challenges of his time, and comparing it with modern responses to similar skeptical challenges in modern philosophy, arguably stemming from the controversies of Buridan’s time. In particular, the chapter argues that the sort of “Demon-skepticism” modern readers are familiar with from Descartes was made conceptually possible precisely by the emergence of late-medieval nominalist semantics, an…Read more
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1Logical Validity in a Token-Based, Semantically Closed LogicIn John Buridan, Oxford University Press. 2009.This chapter provides a comprehensive survey of Buridan’s conception of logical validity in a semantically closed token-based system, as he conceives of natural languages. The chapter argues first that Buridan has very good logical, as well as merely metaphysical, reasons to conceive of natural languages as compositional systems of significative token-symbols. Next, the chapter discusses the peculiar Buridanian conception truth and validity, according to which validity must not be based on truth…Read more
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1Ars artium: essays in philosophical semantics, mediaeval and modernInstiture of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. 1988.
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1Form, intention, information : from scholastic logic to artificial intelligenceIn Ludger Jansen & Petter Sandstad (eds.), Neo-Aristotelian Perspectives on Formal Causation, Routledge. 2021.
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1The Various Kinds of Concepts and the Idea of a Mental LanguageIn John Buridan, Oxford University Press. 2009.Common representational content allows the Buridanian classification of human concepts discussed in the fourth chapter, which provides the first thoroughgoing, systematic survey of Buridan’s conception of a mental language. The chapter discusses the divisions of concepts into syncategorematic and categorematic, simple and complex, absolute and connotative, and singular and common concepts. Besides presenting these classifications, the chapter provides a detailed discussion of the idea of concept…Read more
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1The Primacy of Mental LanguageIn John Buridan, Oxford University Press. 2009.The third chapter discusses how Buridan’s conception of mental language provides the grounding for the objectivity and universality of logic despite the radical conventionality of written and spoken languages. Buridan’s conception, since it is based on the Aristotelian idea of the uniformity of natural human capacities in all individual humans, is nothing like modern psychologism, the kind heavily criticized by Frege. Indeed, Buridan’s mental language is not a “private language” criticized by Wi…Read more
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1Existential Import and the Square of OppositionIn John Buridan, Oxford University Press. 2009.The sixth chapter discusses the issue of how the reconstruction of the relevant parts of Buridan’s logic and medieval logic in general, using restricted variables, validates the attribution of existential import to affirmative propositions, in turn establishing the validity of all relations of the traditional Square of Opposition. The chapter also discusses how Buridan’s theory of natural supposition handles some objections to this conception concerning law-like statements, and, in general, how …Read more
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Natures: the problem of universalsIn Arthur Stephen McGrade (ed.), The Cambridge companion to medieval philosophy, Cambridge University Press. pp. 196--207. 2003.
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Teleology, Intentionality, NaturalismFilozofia 64 (2): 114-122. 2009.After a brief analysis of the specifics of teleological explanations as opposed to causal explanations, the paper seeks to establish the irreducibility of the former to the latter by arguing that teleological explanations are inextricably tied to our notion of intentionality. Since this result undermines the very possibility of “a physicalist reduction” of the explanation of teleological phenomena, especially of human beha- vior, the rest of the paper develops an argument against the perceived n…Read more
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Hylomorphism and Mereology: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Volume 15 (edited book)Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2018.
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William OckhamIn Graham Oppy & Nick Trakakis (eds.), Medieval Philosophy of Religion: The History of Western Philosophy of Religion, Volume 2, Routledge. pp. 3--195. 2009.
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Medieval Themes, Medieval and Modern Volume 11: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics (edited book)Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2014.
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Theory of languageIn Brian Davies & Eleonore Stump (eds.), The Oxford handbook of Aquinas, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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Consequences of a Closed, Token-Based Semantics: The Case of John BuridanBulletin of Symbolic Logic 10 (4): 592-593. 2004.
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Areas of Specialization
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Intentionality |
Semantic Theories |