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179Petrus Thomae: Tractatus brevis de modis distinctionum (review)Vivarium 49 (4): 368-370. 2011.Petrus Thomae: Tractatus brevis de modis distinctionum
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154Ancient and medieval theories of intentionality (edited book)Brill. 2001.This volume analyses ancient and medieval theories of intentionality in various contexts: perception, imagination, and intellectual thinking.
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150Duns Scotus on SignificationJournal of Nietzsche Studies 3 97-120. 1993.Duns Scotus on Signification
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142Essentialism and direct realism: Some late medieval perspectivesTopoi 19 (2): 111-122. 2000.Perler, D. Essentialism and Direct Realism: Some Late Medieval Perspectives. Topoi 19, 111–122 (2000).
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132Emotions and cognitions. Fourteenth-century discussions on the passions of the soulVivarium 43 (2): 250-274. 2005.Medieval philosophers clearly recognized that emotions are not simply "raw feelings" but complex mental states that include cognitive components. They analyzed these components both on the sensory and on the intellectual level, paying particular attention to the different types of cognition that are involved. This paper focuses on William Ockham and Adam Wodeham, two fourteenth-century authors who presented a detailed account of "sensory passions" and "volitional passions". It intends to show th…Read more
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126Spinozas AntiskeptizismusZeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 61 (1): 1-26. 2007.Spinozas These „Wer eine wahre Idee hat, weiß zugleich, dass er eine wahre Idee hat“ hat zahlreiche Interpreten dazu bewogen, ihm eine ernsthafte Auseinandersetzung mit dem Skeptizismus abzusprechen. Es scheint, als würde er die zentrale Frage, welche unabhängige Garantie wir für die Wahrheit einer Idee haben, einfach ignorieren. Gegen diese Auffassung wird argumentiert, dass sich Spinoza durchaus der skeptischen Herausforderung stellt, und zwar indem er eine theoretische Diagnose formuliert: De…Read more
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115Leen Spruit, Species intelligibilis: from Perception to Knowledge (review)Vivarium 34 (2): 280-283. 1996.
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113Things in the Mind: Fourteenth-Century Controversies over Intelligible SpeciesVivarium 34 (2): 231-253. 1996.Vivarium (VIV) is an international journal dedicated to the history of philosophy and intellectual life from the early Middle Ages to the early modern era. It is widely recognized as an unrivalled resource for the history of logic, semantics, epistemology, and metaphysics. It welcomes articles on medieval, Renaissance and early-modern thinkers, their ideas, arguments, and writings, as well as the institutional and intellectual life of this period. Editions of texts as brief appendices to the mai…Read more
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111What am I thinking about? John Duns Scotus and Peter Aureol on intentional objectsVivarium 32 (1): 72-89. 1994.What am I thinking about? John Duns Scotus and Peter Aureol on intentional objects
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105Was there a pyrrhonian crisis in early modern philosophy? A critical notice of Richard H. PopkinArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 86 (2): 209-220. 2004.The journal publishes exceptional articles in all areas of Western philosophy from antiquity up to contemporary philosophy. The Archiv articles are distinguished by precise argumentation and lucid prose.
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84Begriffliche und psychologische Ordnung bei SpinozaArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 90 (2): 188-215. 2008.Spinoza's metaphysical thesis that there is only one substance in the universe but a plurality of modes, each of them falling under an attribute, raises a crucial question. How are modes of thinking, i.e. ideas, related to modes of extension? This paper intends to show that there are at least two answers, depending on an understanding of the equivocal term ‘idea’. If ideas are taken to be mental acts, they are identical with modes of extension. If, however, they are understood in the “objective”…Read more
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78Introduction: Transformations of the Soul. Aristotelian Psychology 1250-1650Vivarium 46 (3): 223-231. 2008.Introduction: Transformations of the Soul. Aristotelian Psychology 1250-1650
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71Late Medieval Ontologies of FactsThe Monist 77 (2): 149-169. 1994.When we are asked what the term ‘Socrates’ signifies, we answer spontaneously, I suppose: “the man Socrates.” And when we are asked what the term ‘white’ signifies, we tend to answer: “the color white” or “whiteness.” Although our second answer may be less spontaneous than the first, either because we may have some difficulty in explaining what a color is, ontologically speaking, or because we may be reluctant to commit ourselves to such a controversial thing as whiteness, we may nevertheless be…Read more
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69Ockham on Emotions in the Divided SoulIn Dominik Perler & Klaus Corcilius (eds.), Ockham on Emotions in the Divided Soul, De Gruyter. pp. 179-198. 2014.Does the soul have parts? What kind of parts? And how do all the parts make together a whole? Many ancient, medieval and early modern philosophers discussed these questions, thus providing a mereological analysis of the soul. The eleven chapters reconstruct and critically examine radically different theories. They make clear that the question of how a single soul can have an internal complexity was a crucial issue for many classical thinkers.
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64Mind, Cognition and Representation: The Tradition of Commentaries on Aristotle’s De anima (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 46 (4). 2008.Late medieval and early modern commentaries on De anima are Janus-faced texts. They look backwards, continuing ancient debates about well-known Aristotelian topics, and forwards, introducing new concepts and methodological principles that pave the way for non-Aristotelian theories of mind. The eleven essays in this volume, which cover the period between the late thirteenth and the early seventeenth centuries, elucidate this double orientation by presenting case studies of Aristotelians who engag…Read more
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63Can We Know Substances? Suárez on a Sceptical PuzzleTheoria 88 (1): 244-269. 2022.It has often been said that the knowability of substances became a problem in the early modern period, when anti-Aristotelians doubted that we could know anything more than the sensory qualities that are present to us. This article argues that the late scholastic Aristotelian Francisco Suárez was already aware of this sceptical problem. On his view, substances are really (and not just modally) distinct from the perceivable qualities, and therefore cannot be known through sense perception. The ar…Read more
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61Causation and Cognition in Early Modern Philosophy (edited book)Routledge. 2020.This book re-examines the roles of causation and cognition in early modern philosophy. The standard historical narrative suggests that early modern thinkers abandoned Aristotelian models of formal causation in favor of doctrines that appealed to relations of efficient causation between material objects and cognizers. This narrative has been criticized in recent scholarship from at least two directions. Scholars have emphasized that we should not think of the Aristotelian tradition in such monoli…Read more
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57Spinoza über TiereArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 96 (2): 232-261. 2014.According to Spinoza, there is no categorical distinction between human and non-human animals: they all belong to the same nature and all consist of bodies with corresponding ideas. This thesis gives rise to two problems. How is it possible to distinguish different types of animals, in particular non-rational and rational ones, if all of them have the same metaphysical structure? And why does Spinoza nevertheless claim that human beings have a privileged status that gives them the right to use n…Read more
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56Semantische und epistemologische Aspekte in Ockhams SatztheorieVivarium 29 (2): 85-103. 1991.Vivarium (VIV) is an international journal dedicated to the history of philosophy and intellectual life from the early Middle Ages to the early-modern era. It is widely recognized as an unrivalled resource for the history of logic, semantics, epistemology, and metaphysics. It welcomes articles on medieval, Renaissance and early-modern thinkers, their ideas, arguments, and writings, as well as the institutional and intellectual life of this period. Editions of texts as brief appendices to the mai…Read more
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53War Aristoteles ein Funktionalist? Überlegungen zum Leib–Seele–ProblemZeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 50 (3): 341-363. 1996.The journal Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, appearing since 1946, is among the most important academic German language journals. It is open to all topics, approaches, and positions of philosophical thought. Given the increasing differentiation and specialization of the field, it thus constitutes a forum offering its various disciplines the opportunity for mutual recognition and exchange. The articles published in it are subject to an anonymous peer review in which internationally renow…Read more
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52Suárez on the Unity of Material SubstancesVivarium 58 (3): 143-167. 2020.Many late medieval Aristotelians assumed that a natural substance has several substantial forms in addition to matter as really distinct parts. This assumption gave rise to a unity problem: why is a substance more than a conglomeration of all these parts? This paper discusses Francisco Suárez’s answer. It first shows that he rejected the idea that there is a plurality of forms, emphasizing instead that each substance has a single form and hence a single structuring principle. It then examines hi…Read more
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49Suárez on ConsciousnessVivarium 52 (3-4): 261-286. 2014.It seems quite natural that we have cognitive access not only to things around us, but also to our own acts of perceiving and thinking. How is this access possible? How is it related to the access we have to external things? And how certain is it? This paper discusses these questions by focusing on Francisco Suárez’s theory, which gives an account of various forms of access to oneself and thereby presents an elaborate theory of consciousness. It argues that Suárez clearly distinguishes between f…Read more
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45Benjamin. Hill & Hendrik Lagerlund (eds.): The Philosophy of Francisco Suárez / Daniel Schwartz (ed.), Interpreting Suárez. Critical Essays (review)Vivarium 52 (1-2): 173-177. 2014.Benjamin. Hill & Hendrik Lagerlund (eds.): The Philosophy of Francisco Suárez / Daniel Schwartz (ed.), Interpreting Suárez. Critical Essays
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45Seeing and Judging: Ockham and Wodeham on Sensory CognitionIn Petra Kärkkäinen & Simo Knuuttila (eds.), Theories of Perception in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy, Springer. pp. 151-169. 2008.The aim of the series Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind is to foster historical research into the nature of thinking and the workings of the mind. The volumes address topics of intellectual history that would nowadays fall into different disciplines like philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, artificial intelligence, cognitive science, etc. The monographs and collections of articles in the series are historically reliable as well as congenial to the contemporary reader. They pr…Read more
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43Robert Pasnau: Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (review)Philosophical Review 108 (1): 143-146. 1999.Historians of philosophy often credit Descartes, Locke, and other seventeenth-century authors with having introduced one of the most vexing problems into epistemology: the problem of mental representations. For these authors claimed that our knowledge of the external world is always mediated by mental representations, so that we have immediate access only to these representations, the ideas in our mind. As is well known, this “veil-of-ideas epistemology” gave rise to a number of skeptical questi…Read more
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41Wie ist ein globaler Zweifel möglich? Zu den Voraussetzungen des frühneuzeitlichen Außenwelt-SkeptizismusZeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 57 (4): 481-512. 2003.Gemäß einer weit verbreiteten These, die besonders durch die Arbeiten von R. Popkin prominent wurde, ist der frühneuzeitliche Skeptizismus auf die Wiederentdeckung des antiken Pyrrhonismus zurückzuführen. Gegen diese These wird im vorliegenden Aufsatz argumentiert, dass Descartes’ Außenwelt-Skeptizismus keine pyrrhonische Struktur aufweist. Er beruht vielmehr auf einem Internalismus, der sich nicht in antiken Quellen findet. Die Entstehung dieses Internalismus wird zum einen in historischer Hins…Read more
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41Ockham on Memory and Double IntentionalityTopoi 41 (1): 133-142. 2020.Ockham developed two theories to explain the intentionality of memory: one theory that takes previously perceived things to be the objects of memory, and another that takes one’s own earlier acts of perceiving to be the objects of memory. This paper examines both theories, paying particular attention to the reasons that motivated Ockham to give up the first theory in favor of the second. It argues that the second theory is to be understood as a theory of double intentionality. At the core of thi…Read more
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40Why is the Sheep Afraid of the Wolf? Medieval Debates on Animal PassionsIn Martin Pickavé & Lisa Shapiro (eds.), Emotion and cognitive life in Medieval and early modern philosophy, Oxford University Press. pp. 547-565. 2012.Abstract of the book This volume has three aims. First, historians of philosophy have typically focused on the discussions of the moral relevance of emotions, and with the exception of scholars of ancient philosophy, neglected the place of emotions in cognitive life. This collection of articles refocuses the discussion of emotion in the medieval and early modern periods to their role in cognition. Second, though many have aimed to clarify relationship between the later thinkers and their predece…Read more
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40Sind die Gegenstände farbig? Zum Problem der Sinneseigenschaften bei DescartesArchiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 80 (2): 182-210. 1998.Sind die Gegenstände farbig? Zum Problem der Sinneseigenschaften bei Descartes
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35Ideen. Repräsentationalismus in der Frühen NeuzeitW. De Gruyter. 2010.The notion of idea is a key concept in early modern philosophy. From Descartes seminal works at the beginning of the 17th century to the work of Thomas Reid in the closing years of the 18th century, discussion in theoretical philosophy is dominated by the debate about the core concept of idea. This two-volume textbook introduces eleven key authors from this period. The first volume presents the central texts in modern translation, often new translations based on the source texts. The second volu…Read more
Areas of Specialization
History of Western Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
History of Western Philosophy |