Joël Biard

The operative conception of mathematics defended by Buridan pushes questions about the ontological status of mathematical objects into the background. However, Buridan could not ignore a certain number of questions debated by his predecessors and contemporaries. In the texts of maturity, the passages on the nature of number are kept to a minimum. But there is an early text in which he polemicises with another master about the ontological status of number. There, he criticises the idea that number has a consistency of its own, distinct from the soul that numbers and from the things that are numbered. The singular things enumerated are not formal parts of the number, but the number itself in its material aspect. On the one hand, number is a way of conceiving of things arranged in such and such a way; on the other, it is these things themselves conceived by means of a ‘discrete’ concept, according to which they are apprehended separately from one another, and independently of any determination other than their unity. Everything rests on the intellect and its modes of conception, while number, or its material aspect, is reducible to collections of units. This conception of number is perfectly consistent with the theory of universals developed by Buridan in the same period.

Title descriptionCe volume se propose d’évaluer la place de Pomponazzi dans la philosophie de la Renaissance, à la fois son ancrage dans des traditions médiévales et sa force d’innovation. A côté de contributions sur le De immortalitate animae (1516), ses antécédents, les débats qu’il a suscités, le volume comprend aussi des interventions sur d’autres questions de philosophie de la nature, ou sur la liberté et le destin, ainsi qu’une contribution davantage centrée sur l’interprétation qui a été réservée à la pensée de Pomponazzi au début du XXe siècle. Les textes de Pomponazzi, et notamment le traité sur l’âme apparaissent ainsi comme des textes frontaliers. Leur étude permet d’évaluer le transfert de certaines thématiques philosophiques médiévales, et en particulier de la noétique aristotélicienne, alexandriste et averroïste, dans le contexte intellectuel de la Renaissance, au sein d’une réflexion générale sur le sens anthropologique et éthique de la finitude constitutive de la nature humaine. This book proposes to evaluate the importance and signification of Pietro Pomponazzi in the philosophy of the Renaissance. It considers both its rooting in Medieval traditions and its innovative force. Besides contributions on Pomponazzi’s De immortalitate animae (1516), its antecedens and the debates that arose, the volume contains contributions on other aspects of the philosophy of nature, or on liberty and fate, and one dedicated to the interpretation of Pomponazzi at the beginning of the twentieth century. So, the texts of Pomponazzi, and especially his treatise on the soul appear as frontier texts. Their study allows an evaluation of the transfer of some medieval thematics, especially of Aristotelian, Alexandrinian and Averroist noetics, in the intellectual context of Renaissance, inside a general reflection upon the anthropological and ethical meaning of the finitude, which is constitutive of human nature.

Late medieval philosophy reformulates all the main concepts of Aristotelian natural philosophy, among which the concept of cause is central. But it is not a linear evolution that would lead to the concept of causality as it is utilized in modern philosophy, though some medieval texts anticipate such a transformation. We cannot really understand the transformations and innovations of natural philosophy in this period, if we do not give up a teleological account of the history of science and philosophy. The natural philosophy of Blasius of Parma, at the end of fourteenth century, should be considered as an original attempt to understand the dynamics of nature: How many principles are required to understand the existence and the movement of nature? What are the driving forces, the motors, and the powers that account for natural changes in the four genera of motion defined by Aristotle (generation, alteration, increase, and local motion)? Within this agenda, Blasius of Parma does not so much seek to unify the concept of cause, but rather to know to what extent one can determine the various powers at work in natural change.

This is a synthetic presentation of the idea of mental language in the Middle Ages. According to this doctrine, the field of intellections or concepts is made of meaningful units carrying semantic properties. Despite analogies between language and thought since Plato and Augustinus, in the strict sense this theory is elaborated in 14th century, mainly by William Ockham and then many authors as Albert of Saxony or Peter of Ailly. The paper examines also the relation between the psychological approach of intellections on the basis of Aristotle’s De anima and the semantic approach of concepts and mental propositions. The theory of mental language deeply modified the analysis of the knowledge at the end of the Middle Ages.

Résumé Cet article examine la Logique de Port Royal en regard des théories médiévales du signe et du langage. Il reprend les célèbres passages consacrés aux signes afin de préciser comment se croisent les notions de représentation et de signification. La Logique de Port Royal récuse la théorie du langage mental, qui était dominante au Moyen Âge tardif, au bénéfice de la force expressive de l’esprit. Celui-ci se subordonne le langage, en une procédure où le langage doit sans cesse s’ajuster à l’idée. L’article montre dans cette conception des rapports entre pensée et langage une présence forte de plusieurs thèses augustiniennes, bien au-delà de la seule définition usuelle du signe. Ni linguistique cartésienne, ni simple théorie cartésienne du jugement, la philosophie du langage de Port Royal se bâtit sur un véritable « augustinisme sémiologique ».

Is a human being something that is one per se, or are humans composed of two independent substances? Treating the soul as the form of an organic body seems to offer one way of addressing the difficulty. But the debates about the nature of the soul which began to emerge in the 1270s made this question problematic. This article considers Buridan’s solution to the problem of how to unify what is corporeal and divisible on the one hand with what is incorporeal and indivisible on the other. Beginning with sensation, which concerns the unity of the sensitive soul and sense data, we turn to the act of thinking, where the intellective soul is united with the image or phantasm qua mover, leading to the realization that the unity of a human being is no longer self-evident. To solve the problem, Buridan takes up and transforms ways of thinking about the human soul inherited from older debates around Averroist psychology, such as the theory of two subjects and the conjunction of the sensible with the intelligible during cognitive activity.

Cet article propose la première édition critique complète des Questions de Jean Buridan sur la Physiognomonie pseudo-aristotélicienne. L’introduction situe le texte dans la tradition physiognomonique médiévale, tout en indiquant les relations de la physiognomonie à la sémiologie, à l’astrologie et à la philosophie morale. L’édition se fonde sur trois manuscrits principaux, et un quatrième pour l’une des deux versions de la première question. Suit l’édition d’une version d’authenticité douteuse, qui recoupe en partie la version éditée, et de trois questions sur la physiognomonie extraites d’un texte qui semble composite, formé de questions de Buridan ou d’esprit buridanien.

Blasius of Parma deals with intensification and remission of accidental forms, and the related concept of « latitude » in at least three texts : the Questiones de latitudinibus formarum, the Questio disputata de intensione et remissione formarum and Question 10 on Book V of the Physics. The paper is focussed on the two last. Blasius discusses theses about the ontological status of qualities and their relation to their subject of inherence through the issue of their intensification or weakening, at the borderline of physics and metaphysics. In the same time, he takes sides for the calculating procedures that were on debate since the beginning of the 14th century. In binding the quality and its subject closely together, Blasius does not go as far as the Oxford Calculators in the mathematisation of intensive magnitudes. Nonetheless, he does attempt to integrate the new tools into his physics and his ontology.