Gyula Klima

This is a brief, accessible introduction to the thought of the philosopher John Buridan (ca. 1295-1361). Little is known about Buridan's life, most of which was spent studying and then teaching at the University of Paris. Buridan's works are mostly by-products of his teaching. They consist mainly of commentaries on Aristotle, covering the whole extent of Aristotelian philosophy, ranging from logic to metaphysics, to natural science, to ethics and politics. Gyula Klima argues that many of Buridan's academic concerns are strikingly similar to those of modern philosophy and his work sometimes quite directly addresses modern philosophical questions

This paper examines the multiple semantic functions Aquinas attributes to the verb ‘est’, ranging from signifying the essence of God to acting as a copula of categorical propositions to expressing identity. A case will be made that all these apparently radically diverse functions are unified under Aquinas’s conception of the analogy of being, treating all predications as predications of being with or without some qualification (secundum quid or simpliciter). This understanding of the multiplicity of the semantic functions of this verb as conceived by Aquinas will enable us to have a better understanding of the meaning of his metaphysical claims and arguments. In particular, with this understanding of Aquinas’ conception of being, we will be able to see how Aquinas’s famous “intellectus essentiae” argument for the thesis of the real distinction between essence and existence in creatures can work, despite Anthony Kenny’s arguments to the contrary in his recent book Aquinas on Being.

“The problem of universals” in general is a historically variable bundle of several closely related, yet in different conceptual frameworks rather differently articulated metaphysical, logical, and epistemological questions, ultimately all connected to the issue of how universal cognition of singular things is possible. How do we know, for example, that the Pythagorean theorem holds universally, for all possible right triangles? Indeed, how can we have any awareness of a potential infinity of all possible right triangles, given that we could only see a finite number of actual ones? How can we universally indicate all possible right triangles with the phrase ‘right triangle’? Is there something common to them all signified by this phrase? If so, what is it, and how is it related to the particular right triangles? The medieval problem of universals is a logical, and historical, continuation of the ancient problem generated by Plato's (428-348 B.C.) theory answering such a bundle of questions, namely, his theory of Ideas or Forms.

This 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 conceptual changes shaking these metaphysical foundations with the emergence of modern philosophy.

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 refute the opponent’s position. In this reply I am going to argue that even if Roark’s objections may not be necessarily good in the first, trivial sense, they are..

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 thoroughgoing nominalist, as is well-known, but also a staunch defender of a strong essentialist doctrine against certain skeptics of his time. But then the question inevitably arises: could he consistently maintain such a doctrine?

This paper argues that Aquinas's conception of the human soul and intellect offers a consistent alternative to the dilemma of materialism and post-Cartesian dualism. It also argues that in their own theoretical context, Aquinas' arguments for the materiality of the human soul and immateriality of the intellect provide a strong justification of his position. However, that theoretical context is rather "alien" to ours in contemporary philosophy. The conclusion of the paper will point in the direction of what can be done to render Aquinas's position more palatable to contemporary philosophers.

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 abstractionist theory of the formation of genuinely universal representational content to solve the resulting issues, however, the paper argues further, his solution is committed to attributing the sort of “aspectuality” to universal absolute concepts that his Ockhamist semantics denies to them. The conclusion of the paper suggests how Aquinas’s “moderate realism” can provide a consistent solution without the ontological extravaganza of ontological realists, without conflating the mere indifference of singular representation with genuine universality, and without having to deny aspectuality to our quidditative universal concepts formed by abstraction

This volume is the first annotated translation in any language of the entire text of the Summulae de dialectica, by the Parisian master of arts John Buridan (1300-1358). One of the most influential works in the history of late medieval philosophy, the Summulae is Buridan's systematic exposition of his nominalist philosophy of logic. Buridan's doctrine spread rapidly and for some two hundred years was dominant at many European universities. His work is of increasing interest today not only to historians of medieval philosophy but also to modern philosophers, several of whom find in Buridan's ideas important clues to problems of contemporary philosophy. Gyula Klima provides a substantial introduction to Buridan's life and work and discusses his place in the history of logic. Through extensive notes Klima assists philosopher and medievalist alike to read Buridan with understanding and insight. Those with a philosophical interest in the relations among the structures of language, thought, and reality will find much to ponder in the Summulae.

Anthony 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. Therefore, while duly acknowledging the book's virtues of clarity of presentation, and its highly readable, almost conversational style, let me concentrate in this brief review on this problematic aspect of Kenny's book, as someone who is just as much concerned with making Aquinas accessible to a contemporary audience as the author is.

Is 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”, combined with the Avicennean idea of the indifference of nature, yielding the Thomistic doctrine of the formal unity of the knower and the known renders the question moot with regard to Aquinas, indeed, with regard to the pre-modern epistemological tradition in general. These considerations will then lead to a number of further, both historical and philosophical questions, which I will offer in the end for further discussion.

Contemporary "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, no less rigorous in its own theoretical context--that things have essences.

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 need of any such reduction. According to the conclusion of the paper, a more promising program is the development of a “modern, scientific Aristotelianism”, one that can provide a consistent conceptual framework that accommodates both types of explanation