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19Anthony Kenny's book is one of the best of its genre, exemplifying the kind of introduction into (some field of) Aquinas's thought that endeavors to make his ideas accessible to the philosophically interested contemporary reader in terms of such philosophical, scientific and everyday concepts with which the reader can safely be assumed to be familiar. Indeed, Kenny's book provides us with such a good example of this genre that it brings into sharp focus the problems of the genre itself. Therefor…Read more
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50This course covers paradigmatic accounts of human nature in ancient, medieval, and early modern philosophy, through a careful reading of selected primary texts and contemporary commentary. Major topics will include knowledge and opinion; body and soul; immortality, rationality, and freedom of the will; created being and goodness as emanations of divine perfection. The main focus of the discussions will be on the metaphysical foundations of moral value in the pre-modern tradition, and the concept…Read more
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14cannot, cover the broad topic indicated in the title. Rather, it will concern itself only with some preliminary ideas leading the way to a larger project, which, however, should eventually bear an even broader title. As a matter of fact, here I will consider at some length only two authors from the beginning of the period indicated in the title, namely, Aquinas and Siger of Brabant. (Or perhaps three authors, provided the anonymous author of the..
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60In his admirably clear, beautifully argued study, Claude Panaccio has provided an able defense of Ockham’s position in response to an argument I presented against Ockham in a discussion with Peter King eight years ago at a meeting in Pittsburgh.1 But after eight years, and even after Claude’s book, I still stand by that argument. So, in these comments I will attempt to explain why I think Ockham may still not be off the hook.
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10Thomas of SuttonIn H. Lagerlund (ed.), Encyclopedia of Medieval Philosophy, Springer. pp. 1294--1294. 2011.
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46Conceptual closure in Anselm's proof: reply to Tony RoarkHistory and Philosophy of Logic 24 (2): 131-134. 2003.Let me begin my reply to Professor Roark’s objections in good old scholastic fashion, by a distinction. Philosophical objections can be good in two senses. In the first, trivial sense, a good objection is one that convincingly shows the presence of a genuine error in a position or reasoning. Such objections are useful, but uninspiring. In the second, non-trivial sense, a good philosophical objection broadens and deepens our understanding of the problems at issue, whether or not they manage to re…Read more
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137The Essentialist Nominalism of John BuridanReview of Metaphysics 58 (4). 2005.To many contemporary philosophers, the phrase “essentialist nominalism” may appear to be an oxymoron. After all, essentialism is the doctrine that things come in natural kinds characterized by their essential properties, on account of some common nature or essence they share. But nominalism is precisely the denial of the existence, indeed, the very possibility of such shared essences. Nevertheless, despite the intuitions of such contemporary philosophers,2 John Buridan was not only a thoroughgoi…Read more
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45One often hears extravagant claims made for the Aristotelian doctrine that "what understands and what is understood are the same" De anima iii.4; 430a4). This identity between knower and what is known, or between percipient and what is perceived, is often said to offer a way out of the familiar skeptical arguments against the possibility of our having knowledge of the external world. Typically such claims are made by students of Thomas Aquinas, who in this way seek to render Aquinas's theory of …Read more
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381Indifference vs. Universality of Mental Representation in Ockham, Buridan, and AquinasQuestio. Yearbook of the History of Metaphysics 10 (1): 99-110. 2010.This paper argues in the first place that nominalists are right in insisting against ontological realists that semantic universality does not require commitment to universal entities. However, Ockham, in his zeal to get rid of Scotus’s universal entities, swept under the carpet the issue of universal representational content of genuinely universal symbols, conflating it with the mere indifference of the information content of non-distinctive singular representations. Buridan did come up with an …Read more
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43Consequences of a closed, token-based semantics: the case of John BuridanHistory and Philosophy of Logic 25 (2): 95-110. 2004.This paper argues for two principal conclusions about natural language semantics based on John Buridan's considerations concerning the notion of formal consequence, that is, formally valid inference. (1) Natural languages are essentially semantically closed, yet they do not have to be on that account inconsistent. (2) Natural language semantics has to be token based, as a matter of principle. The paper investigates the Buridanian considerations leading to these conclusions, and considers some ob…Read more
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24Ockham's semantics and ontology of the categoriesIn P. V. Spade (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Ockham, Cambridge University Press. pp. 118--42. 1999.
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20"What can a scholastic do in the 20 th century?" - asks Katalin Vidrányi in the title of her article written in 1970. [1] If her characteristically systematic and pithy analysis can be summarized in a single sentence, the author's answer is this: many things, but not too much.
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79Thomistic “Monism” vs. Cartesian “Dualism”History of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 10 92-112. 2007.This paper contrasts the Thomistic and Cartesian interpretations of what the substantial unity of the body and mind can consist in. A detailed discussion of the Thomistic account of the substantial unity of body and soul identifies especially those principles of the presupposed hylomorphist metaphysical background of this account that Descartes abandoned. After arguing for the consistency of the Thomistic view, briefly outlines how certain developments in late-medieval scholasticism prepared the…Read more
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107Aquinas vs. Buridan on Essence and ExistenceIn Lukás Novák, Daniel D. Novotný, Prokop Sousedík & David Svoboda (eds.), Metaphysics: Aristotelian, Scholastic, Analytic, Ontos Verlag. pp. 30-44. 2012.
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131Quine, Wyman, and Buridan: Three approaches to ontological commitmentKorean Journal of Logic 8 (1): 1-22. 2005.This paper provides a comparison of three fundamentally different approaches to the issue of ontological commitment. It argues that despite superficial similarities on either side, Buridan’s approach provides an intriguing third alternative to the two commonly recognized modern approaches.
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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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57Is Aquinas a representationalist or a direct realist? Max Herrera’s (and, for that matter, Claude Panaccio’s) qualified answers to each alternative show that the real significance of the question is not that if we answer it, then we can finally learn under which classification Aquinas should fall, but rather that upon considering it we can learn something about the intricacies of the question itself. In these comments I will first argue that the Averroistic notion of “intentional transfer”, comb…Read more
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47The Semantic Principles Underlying St. Thomas Aquinas's Metaphysics of BeingMedieval Philosophy & Theology 5 (1): 87-141. 1996.
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196Contemporary "essentialism", if we want to provide a succinct, yet sufficiently rigorous characterization, may be summarized in the thesis that some common terms are rigid designators. [1] By the quotation marks I intend to indicate that I regard this as a somewhat improper (though, of course, permitted) usage of the term (after all, nomina significant ad placitum [2]). In contrast to this, essentialism, properly so-called, is the Aristotelian doctrine summarizable in the thesis--as we shall see…Read more
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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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26Aquinas' Theory of the Copula and the Analogy of BeingHistory of Philosophy & Logical Analysis 5 159-176. 2002.This paper primarily aims to provide a coherent interpretation of several, apparently conflicting claims made by Aquinas concerning the semantic function of the copula. The paper also argues that these claims can properly be understood only if they are interpreted as forming a coherent part of Aquinas' larger theory of the analogy of being. The Appendix sketches a model theoretical semantics for the reconstruction of Aquinas' relevant ideas, providing the technical means for setting apart the va…Read more
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51In these comments I am going to argue that Yiwei Zheng's paper, by postulating an imaginary mental language in a proposed new interpretation of Ockham's conception of mental language, provides us with an imaginary solution to what turns out to be an imaginary problem. Having said this, however, I hasten to add that the paper has undeniable merits in pointing us in the right direction for revealing the imaginary character of the problem.
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1Ars artium: essays in philosophical semantics, mediaeval and modernInstiture of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. 1988.
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34In order to make this point, in the next section I will present a very simple, intuitive reconstruction of Anselm’s argument. Then, in the third section, I will show that since the argument thus reconstructed is obviously valid, and it would be foolish to challenge any other of its premises except the assumption that God does not exist in reality, it is a sound proof of God’s existence. Nevertheless, in the fourth section, I will argue further that despite its soundness, this proof can rationall…Read more
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79Logic without Truth: Buridan on the LiarIn Shahid Rahman, Tero Tulenheimo & Emmanuel Genot (eds.), Unity, truth and the liar: the modern relevance of medieval solutions to the liar paradox, Springer. pp. 87-112. 2008.
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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 and Renaissance Philosophy |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Intentionality |
Semantic Theories |