Jordan Lavender

According to a venerable historical narrative, a crucial step in the development of the modern picture of the mind occurred when Descartes argued that sensing occurs in the immaterial human mind, together with thought and volition. The mind, the story goes, had once been the home only of rational thought and volition, with sensations being embodied phenomena, much like digestion, growth, or weaving. However, I show in this article that the view that human sensations are immaterial, non‐extended modifications of the immaterial human intellect rose to prominence in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. In Section 1, I examine the background for this fourteenth‐century immaterial turn in the more familiar views of sensation prominent in the thirteenth century. In Section 2, I show how the view that human sensation is just as immaterial as thought emerged in the work of some of William of Ockham's associates in England. In Section 3, I bring to light two important developments in the way philosophers thought about the nature of sensation that led to the Immaterial Turn. In Section 4, I briefly discuss a puzzle about the way scholastics in the Immaterial Turn conceived of sensation.

While many thirteenth-century scholastic philosophers thought that the human powers of sensation are distinct from the human intellect, this apparent consensus collapsed in the 1320s, ‘30s, and ‘40s. The proximate cause of this transformation was Walter Chatton’s rejection of William of Ockham’s arguments that the human powers of sensation are distinct from the human intellect. This article examines Chatton’s implicit and explicit motivations for rejecting Ockham’s arguments. I show that Ockham thinks that the senses are distinct from the intellect because he holds that sensing is material and embodied in a way that thinking is not. I show that Chatton, on the other hand, sees no need to posit such a difference between sensation and thought with respect to materiality or embodiment because he thinks that nothing about the character of sensory experience shows it to be material or embodied in a way that thinking is not.

Does human happiness consist in God, as the widespread medieval view that God is the last end of human beings would suggest, or does it consist in the experience of God, the view suggested by medieval readings of Aristotle? In response to this theological problem, the important fourteenth-century philosopher John of Ripa developed one of the most innovative and subtle late medieval theories of the metaphysics of awareness. This article provides an account of Ripa’s theory of awareness and shows how the theory was both motivated by and intended to solve this central theological problem for late medieval thought. In Section 1, I present the theological problem. In Section 2, I examine Ripa’s innovative theory of the metaphysics of awareness. In Section 3, I show how Ripa uses his account of the metaphysics of awareness to offer a solution to the theological problem.