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2Buridan’s Essentialist NominalismIn John Buridan, Oxford University Press. 2009.The final chapter provides a summary account of Buridan’s essentialist nominalism, showing how Buridan can successfully claim to be both a nominalist denying the existence of real shared essences and an essentialist endorsing the possibility of discovering truly essential attributes of things, which allows valid scientific generalizations. The concluding critical part of the chapter, however, points out a fundamental conflict between Buridan’s abstractionist cognitive psychology of absolute conc…Read more
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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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55Aquinas’s Real Distinction and Its Role in a Causal Proof of God’s ExistenceRoczniki Filozoficzne 67 (4): 7-26. 2019.This paper is not going to offer any criticism of the way Gaven Kerr treats Aquinas’ argument. Instead, it offers an alternative way of reconstructing Aquinas’ argument, intending to strengthen especially those controversial aspects of it that Kerr’s reconstruction left untreated or in relative obscurity. Accordingly, although the paper’s treatment will have to have some overlaps with Kerr’s, it will deal with issues essential to adequate replies to certain competent criticisms of his argument u…Read more
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15Intentionality, Cognition, and Mental Representation in Medieval Philosophy (edited book)Fordham University. 2015.
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18The Metaphysics of Personal Identity: Proceedings of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics Volume 13 (edited book)Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 2016.
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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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34Aquinas’ Balancing ActBochumer Philosophisches Jahrbuch Fur Antike Und Mittelalter 21 (1): 29-48. 2018.In this paper, I will primarily argue for the consistency of Aquinas’ conception, according to which the human soul, uniquely in God’s creation, is both the inherent, material, substantial form of the human body, and the subsistent immaterial substance underlying the immaterial operations of its immaterial, rational powers, namely, intellect and will. In this discussion, I will point out that typical challenges to Aquinas’ conception usually rely on semantic or ontological assumptions that can p…Read more
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7Questions on the soul by John Buridan and others (edited book)Springer. 2017.This volume features essays that explore the insights of the 14th-century Parisian nominalist philosopher, John Buridan. It serves as a companion to the Latin text edition and annotated English translation of his question-commentary on Aristotle's On the Soul. The contributors survey Buridan's work both in its own historical-theoretical context and in relation to contemporary issues. The essays come in three main sections, which correspond to the three books of Buridan's Questions. Coverage firs…Read more
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217Intentionality, Cognition, and Mental Representation in Medieval Philosophy (edited book)Fordham University Press. 2015.It is supposed to be common knowledge about the history of ideas that one of the few medieval philosophical contributions preserved in modern philosophical thought is the idea that mental phenomena are distinguished from physical phenomena by their intentionality, their directedness toward some object. As is usually the case with such commonplaces about the history of ideas, this claim is not quite true. Medieval philosophers routinely described ordinary physical phenomena, such as reflections i…Read more
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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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181Latin as a Formal LanguageCahiers de l'Institut du Moyen-Âge Grec Et Latin 61 78-106. 1991.An attempt at a Montague-style reconstruction of the semantics of Buridan's logic on a regimented fragment of Latin.
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28Ontological Reduction by Logical Analysis and the Primitive Vocabulary of MentaleseAmerican Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 86 (3): 403-414. 2012.This paper confronts a certain modern view of the relation between semantics and ontology with that of the late-medieval nominalist philosophers, William Ockham and John Buridan. The modern view in question is characterized in terms of what is called here “the thesis of onto-semantic parallelism,” which states that the primitive (indefinable) categorematic concepts of our semantics mark out the primary entities in reality. The paper argues that, despite some apparently plausible misinterpretatio…Read more
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11The lectures presented here are the by-product of my teaching in Yale's Directed Studies program from 1991 through 1993 (hence the title, for want of a better). In fact, being what they are, lecture notes for an introductory philosophy course, they present rather elementary material. Yet, I flatter myself, they do not lack certain originality in the treatment of some of the basic questions of traditional metaphysics and epistemology. In any case, over the past couple of years they proved to be q…Read more
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54Is there a grammar of the name ‘God’? In an obvious and trivial sense there certainly is. This term, being a part of the English language, has to obey the grammatical rules of that language. So, for example, by consulting the relevant textbooks and dictionaries we can establish that ‘God’ is a noun, so it can function as the subject or predicate of simple categorical sentences, but it cannot, for example, function as a verb or a preposition.
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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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49The 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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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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1Ars artium: essays in philosophical semantics, mediaeval and modernInstiture of Philosophy, Hungarian Academy of Sciences. 1988.
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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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35Robert Pasnau’s paper presents a strong thesis, which it does not manage to substantiate. The thesis in question is that the Aristotelian doctrine of the identity of the knower and the known, as interpreted by St. Thomas, cannot possibly be used to fend off skepticism.
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Areas of Specialization
Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy |
Metaphysics and Epistemology |
Intentionality |
Semantic Theories |