Peter Adamson

With this latest volume of the History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps, the series comes to the threshold of the early modern era and establishes the background of the developments that unfolded during the Enlightenment. The book offers an introduction to philosophy around Europe in the fifteenth and, especially, sixteenth centuries. The focus is on the parallel and intertwining emergence of humanism and of religious reform, as figures like Erasmus, Luther, and Calvin remade the intellectual and spiritual life of Europe. In three sections, the book examines philosophical developments in central Europe, France, and Britain, touching on a wide range of topics and controversies, from debates over free will to the legitimacy of tyrannicide. This was also the time of the Northern Renaissance, so that we see a resurgence of ancient concepts like skepticism and atomist theories of matter. A final part of the book charts the Catholic reaction to these epochal events in the Counter-Reformation, and especially the ideas of Spanish thinkers like Molina and Suárez. Quite a few familiar thinkers are discussed, like Montaigne and Copernicus. But as always in this series, the book lavishes attention on fascinating figures often ignored in the history of philosophy, like John Dee, Robert Fludd, and Oliva Sabuco (who is one of numerous women intellectuals covered). Another feature of the volume is its attention to literature and the arts: the reader will learn how the achievements of Dürer, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Cervantes relate to philosophical currents of the time.

This article offers an analysis of the argumentative method of two treatises by Alexander of Aphrodisias, _On Fate_ and _On Providence_, the latter of which is preserved only in Arabic translation. It is argued that both texts use techniques from Aristotelian dialectic, albeit in different ways, with _On Fate_ adhering to methods outlined in Aristotle's _Topics_ whereas _On Providence_ uses the ‘aporetic’ method familiar from texts such as _Metaphysics_ Β. This represents a revision of a previous study of Alexander's method in _On Fate_ by Jaap Mansfeld, which emphasized parallels between that method and the techniques of ancient scepticism. It is, however, suggested that Alexander does reflect developments in epistemology during the Hellenistic period, especially in so far as he ‘upgrades’ the status of _endoxa_ to play something like the role of common conceptions in the dogmatic Hellenistic schools.

This article offers an analysis, translation, and edition of a brief, recently uncovered Arabic text by the tenth-century ce Christian Aristotelian thinker Yaḥyā ibn ʿAdī. Ibn ʿAdī here takes issue with an argument for the existence of God, widely used in kalām (Islamic theology). According to this argument, bodies cannot exist without being either in motion or at rest; motion and rest must begin; therefore all bodies and hence the universe as a whole must have begun. Ibn ʿAdī diagnoses various flaws in this reasoning, including a supposed part–whole fallacy. The analysis of the text shows how it fits into Ibn ʿAdī’s intellectual profile and the project of the Baghdad Aristotelian school.

This chapter presents, through vivid retelling and reconstruction of a debate between a tenth-century Arabic logician and a traditional Arabic grammarian, the site of encounter, conflict, and resolution between two traditions. Although they seem on the surface to hold two different theories of linguistic content (a bipartite theory from grammar, a tripartite theory from Aristotelian logic), the chapter shows that at root the two traditions are not in such conflict. Apart from criticizing the foreignness of logic, the grammarian’s deeper criticism was that, by prioritizing the mental over the verbal, the logical analysis of language was unprepared to deal with problems of polysemy and synonymy. This chapter tracks the details of this debate, and explains that in the end Avicenna brought the two traditions together by presenting a genuinely Arabic logic.

This chapter examines the history of a certain kind of argument in the philosophy of mind, which stretches from Plato to the medieval period. According to this style of argument, we can establish the nature of the mind by thinking about the nature of its object. Thus, from the fact that the mind grasps propositions that are universal in scope and necessary in modality, we can rule out that the mind is made of a physical organ, which would “particularize” the content of its thoughts. It will be shown how this sort of assumption underlies arguments for the incorporeality of mind in several philosophers of the Islamic world, especially Averroes and Avicenna, and then shown how the affinity argument was rejected by thinkers who came after Avicenna and arguably defended intuitions much closer to those held by philosophers today.

This chapter looks at theories of world soul in the medieval period, considering texts from the Islamic world and Latin Christendom. The central theme is the comparison between the cosmos and an individual human, who is conceived as a so-called microcosm. By this logic, since the human has a soul, so must the cosmos. Plato’s _Timaeus_ is shown to be a key source for both cultures, including in Christian authors who detected a reference to the Holy Spirit behind Plato’s notion of World Soul. Figures in focus include al-Razi, the Brethren of Purity, the School of Chartres, Peter Abelard, and Hildegard of Bingen.

This chapter examines ethical attitudes toward animals in the Islamic world, alongside the rich psychological theories developed by thinkers, including Avicenna, to explain the sophisticated behaviors of which animals are capable. On the ethical front, al-Rāzī, Ibn Bājja, Ibn Ṭufayl, and the Brethren of Purity are shown to have presented remarkable defenses of benevolence towards animals. Regarding psychology, the chapter explores the range of cognitive powers ascribed to animals, focusing on the higher faculties that overlap with the so-called “internal senses” in humans.

This piece offers an edition, translation, and analysis of a newly discovered text by Yaḥyā Ibn ʿAdī, a leading Aristotelian of the Baghdad school in the tenth century. It briefly discusses what Aristotle meant, at the end of the _Physics_, by saying that the Prime Mover is “in” the outermost heaven. Ibn ʿAdī argues, in part through an exhaustive discussion of the senses of the word “in,” that God is in the sphere only in the sense that an object of intellection is in an intellect. This solution is discussed against the background of ancient commentaries on the same passage.

A much-maligned feature of ancient and medieval political thought is its tendency to appeal to nature to establish norms for human communities. From Aristotle's claim that humans are political animals to Aquinas' invocation of natural law, it may seem that pre-modern philosophers were all too ready to assume that whatever is natural is good, and that just political arrangements must somehow be natural. The papers in this collection show that this assumption is, at best, too crude. From very early, for instance in the ancient sophists' contrast between nomos and physis, there was recognition that political arrangements may be precisely artificial, not natural, and it may be questioned whether even such supposed naturalists as Aristotle in fact adopt the quick inference from natural to good. The papers in this volume trace the complex interrelations between nature and such concepts as law, legitimacy, and justice, covering a wide historical range stretching from Plato and the Sophists to Aristotle, Hellenistic philosophy, Cicero, the Neoplatonists Plotinus and Porphyry, ancient Christian thinkers, and philosophers of both the Islamic and Christian Middle Ages.

This book brings together the study of two great disciplines of the Islamic world: law and philosophy. In both sunni and shiite Islam, it became the norm for scholars to acquire a high level of expertise in the legal tradition. Thus some of the greatest names in the history of Aristotelianism were trained jurists, like Averroes, or commented on the status and nature of law, like al-Fārābī. While such authors sought to put law in its place relative to the philosophical disciplines, others criticized philosophy from a legal viewpoint, like al-Ghazālī and Ibn Taymiyya. But this collection of papers does not only explore the relative standing of law and philosophy. It also looks at how philosophers, theologians, and jurists answered philosophical questions that arise from jurisprudence itself. What is the logical structure of a well-formed legal argument? What standard of certainty needs to be attained in passing down judgments, and how is that standard reached? What are the sources of valid legal judgment and what makes these sources authoritative? May a believer be excused on grounds of ignorance? Together the contributions provide an unprecedented demonstration of the close connections between philosophy and law in Islamic society, while also highlighting the philosophical interest of texts normally studied only by legal historians.

This chapter situates the Ḥatäta of Zär’a Ya‛ǝqob-and Ethiopian philosophy more generally-within the larger context of Eastern Christian philosophy. It identifies several recurring themes and features of philosophy in Eastern Christian literature across linguistic and confessional boundaries. These include the production of translations, especially of originally Greek sources; a penchant for “popular” philosophical material, often encouraging an ascetic way of life; and the deployment of philosophy in the apologetic context of interreligious debate. It concludes by arguing that the rationalism of the Ḥatäta is therefore no obstacle to situating it within Ethiopian philosophy.

This paper looks at critiques of the notorious doctrine of the Active Intellect, first introduced by al-Fārābī and further developed by Ibn Sīnā (Avicenna). The Active Intellect plays two roles in Ibn Sīnā’s thought. First, it somehow facilitates human thinking. Second, it provides form to suitably prepared matter to produce natural substances. Among later critics of this doctrine, particularly significant were Abū l-Barakāt al Baghdādī and Fakhr al-Dīn al-Rāzī, who proposed that the same functions could be played by other causes, for instance celestial souls. The also paper contextualizes these objections within their broader philosophical commitments, for instance to the idea that humanity is divided into numerous “subtypes” that might each have their own celestial cause.