Simone Guidi

This volume publishes the Proceedings of the 1st International Meeting "Thinking Baroque in Portugal" (26-28 June 2017), which dealt with the metaphysical, ethical and political thought of Francisco Suárez. Counting on the collaboration of some of the greatest international specialists in the work and thought of this famous professor of the University of Coimbra in the 17th century, this volume celebrates the 400th anniversary of his death and marks the productivity of his philosophical-theological legacy.

In its literal meaning, the term ἔκστασις (ekstasis) indicates a displacement, ‘being out of immobility’, and ultimately being outside oneself. To some extent, this term takes on a mystical connotation in late Antiquity, notably in book VI.9.11.24 of Plotinus’ Enneads, where ekstasis is described as a non-ordinary way of seeing. The notion of ecstasy, often inseparable from the concept of vision, would keep its mystical role, though altered in some ways, over the centuries, conceptualizing a specific kind of knowledge, which goes beyond the subject-object opposition, addressing the epistemological issues of perceiving and knowing the divine, and often challenging the nature of the self. This issue offers some attempts to track the constant reshaping and migration of the notions of ecstasy and intellectual or spiritual vision over the history of Western thought, unearthing their structural and constant persistence, from the Middle Ages to the contemporary ages, recurrently in many different non-ultimately-dialectical metaphysical systems. The papers in this volume provide some illustrative examples of the tangled history of the divergent meanings that the notions of ecstasy and vision have taken on, and their considerable reassessments and adaptations to constantly evolving conceptual frameworks, often redefining further notions such as those of rapture, prophecy, sleep, dream, and death.

This chapter deals with Thomas Browne’s most famous work, Religio Medici, and especially with his account of Charity. The first paragraph focuses on Browne’s specific account of the relationship between natural and supernatural. This view is inspired by Bacon, Sebunde, and Montaigne, and is crucial to understand the background of Browne’s view about the virtue of Charity. The second paragraph is about Browne’s specific understanding of Charity, which seems to be a middle stage between the traditional, Scholastic doctrine, and the Kantian idea of moral law, independent from the practical law and the desire of the subject. The third paragraph deals with Religio Medici’s reversal of the traditional “order” of Charity, as well as Browne’s accounts of abnegation and friendship as an effective way for a charity to the self which meets many aspects of Foucault’s ἑπιμέλεια έαuτου. The fourth paragraph is about Browne’s analogical understanding of medicine and morality, as well as his use of the meditatio mortis.

In this paper I focus on the historiographical fate of Francisco Suárez (1548–1617) and Pedro da Fonseca (1528–1599) in two Iberian journals ran by Jesuits and founded in 1945: the Spanish Pensamiento, and the Portuguese Revista portuguesa de filosofia. I endeavor to show that the discussions of Suárez’s and Fonseca’s ideas on these journal is a two-sided case of constructing the legacies of major figures in late scholasticism, and I emphasize how the demand to identify cultural national heroes intertwines with theoretical and ideological elements, especially the peculiar history of the Iberian Peninsula, and to the historical relationships between Spain and Portugal. With regard to Suárez, the Pensamiento group strives to carve out a specific place for Neo-Suarezianism within Neo-Thomism, also via a substantive reassessment of Suárez’s importance in the history of scholasticism and of philosophy in general. Hence, Suárez’s thought undergoes triumphant reevaluation, which even aims at ousting Aquinas as the ultimate reference of scholasticism, to make Suárez’s Thomism the principal authority of contemporary schools. By contrast, Fonseca remains a rather obscure and neglected figure, dug up by his fellow compatriots on the Revista portuguesa de filosofia, also against this attempt at establishing a Suarezian, Spanish hegemony.

This book collects six unpublished and published academic studies on the thought of Francisco Suárez, which is addressed through accurate textual analyses and meticulous contextualization of his doctrines in the Scholastic debate. The present essays aim to portray two complementary aspects coexisting in the work of the Uncommon Doctor: his innovative approach and his adherence to the tradition. To this scope, they focus on some pivotal, but often neglected, topics in Suárez’s metaphysics and psychology – such as his theories of cognition and truth, angelology, continuous quantity – thereby developing an original inquiry into a crucial moment in the development of Western philosophy.

In this paper I reconstruct and discuss Antonio Rubio (1546-1615)’s theory of the composition of the continuum, as set out in his Tractatus de compositione continui, a part of his influential commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, published in 1605 but rewritten in 1606. Here I attempt especially to show that Rubio’s is a significant case of Scholastic overlapping between Aristotle’s theory of infinitely divisible parts and indivisibilism or ‘Zenonism’, i.e. the theory that allows for indivisibles, extensionless points, lines, and surfaces, which are supposed to take part in the composition of the continuum. Even if such a syncretic tendency was, in many different ways, already developing in the medieval period and then at the end of the sixteenth century, Rubio’s position is indeed peculiar. He maintains that indivisibles are real and actual, infinite in act, really distinct from each other, and that, although they indwell in substance, indivisibles do not contribute directly to the constitution of the continuum. In this reconstruction, I emphasize notably Rubio’s usage of mereological notions like those of part, whole, completeness and incompleteness.

Themed Section of Bruniana & Campanelliana 2022/1, pp. 85-198 - Simone Guidi, Introduction; - Andrew W. Arlig, Part-Whole Interdependence and the Presence of Form in Matter According to Some Fifteenth-Century Platonists; - Jean-Pascal Anfray, Aux limites de la métaphysique: parties, indivisibles et contact chez Suárez; - Simone Guidi, Indivisibles, Parts, and Wholes in Rubio’s Treatise on the Composition of Continuum (1605); - Dana Jalobeanu, Dissecting Nature ad vivum: Parts and Wholes in Francis Bacon’s Natural Philosophy; - Carla Rita Palmerino, From Active Matter to Inertia, from Celerity to Slowness: the Motion of Atoms and of Compound Bodies in Gassendi’s Physics.

Second Scholasticism greatly developed the medieval theory of continuous quantity as the Aristotelian notion for thematizing spatial extension, paving the way for the idea of space as extension in early modern natural philosophy. The article analyzes the section related to the category of continuous quantity in the Coimbra commentary on the Dialectics (1606), showing that it is indebted to the novel theory of Francisco Suárez on quantity as bestowing extension to a body in a particular sense, something which had been overlooked by previous research. The scholarly debate on quantity was brought to China, and here the Chinese translation is examined of the section on quantity in the fourth volume of the Mingli Tan, published in China in 1636-­1639.

In this paper I reconstruct and discuss Antonio Rubio (1546-1615)’s theory of the composition of the continuum, as set out in his Tractatus de compositione continui, a part of his influential commentary on Aristotle’s Physics, published in 1605 but rewritten in 1606. Here I attempt especially to show that Rubio’s is a significant case of Scholastic overlapping between Aristotle’s theory of infinitely divisible parts and indivisibilism or ‘Zenonism’, i.e. the theory that allows for indivisibles, extensionless points, lines, and surfaces, which are supposed to take part in the composition of the continuum. Even if such a syncretic tendency was, in many different ways, already developing in the medieval period and then at the end of the sixteenth century, Rubio’s position is indeed peculiar. He maintains that indivisibles are real and actual, infinite in act, really distinct from each other, and that, although they indwell in substance, indivisibles do not contribute directly to the constitution of the continuum. In this reconstruction I emphasize notably Rubio’s usage of mereological notions like those of part, whole, completeness and incompleteness.

This article aims at reassessing a widespread view, according to which Francisco Suárez left behind the scholastic model of truth as adaequatio, founding a new concept of truth based on his metaphysics of objective being. In the first part, I reconstruct the debate on the complex and incomplex truth, focusing especially on the sources of Suárez’s Disputation 8, and presenting the views of Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, Hervaeus, Durandus, Capreolus and Fonseca. Especially the latter proposes an eclectic synthesis, blending elements from the Dominican tradition and Henry of Ghent. In the second part, I analyze Suárez’s Disputation 8, showing that his doctrine of truth reprises and mitigates Fonseca’s, thus following most of the Dominican commentators of Aquinas. Here I explain especially the role played by objective being in the constitution of the truth in cognoscendo, also showing that the latter cannot be given without a previous adequation on the level of the truth in significando (the species). In the third part, I discuss three textual passages used by contemporary historiography to legitimate Suárez’s alleged abandonment of adaequatio, pointing out, in the light of the previous reconstruction, some misreadings in these interpretations

In this paper, I aim to address a specific issue underpinning Cartesian metaphysics since its first public appearance in the Discourse right up until the Meditations, but which definitely came to the surface in the Second and Fifth Replies. It involves the possibility that to be thinking and to be extended do not actually contrast as two entirely different properties; hence, these two essences cannot serve as the basis for a disjunctive, real distinction between two corresponding substances, the mind and the body. I dub this problem the ‘thinking matter issue.’ I suggest that Descartes’s concerns about the ‘thinking matter issue’ characterizes and structures the entirety of Meditation Two and its connection with Meditation Six, especially in the attempt to covertly implement what I refer to as Descartes’s ‘prejudice strategy.’ The core of the ‘prejudice strategy’ lies in the idea that the ‘thinking matter issue’ is just a false problem, one raised by the inadequate notions of the mind and the body that we apply to this problem. In section 1, I set out the way in which the ‘thinking matter issue’ emerged in Descartes’s philosophy after the first exposition of his metaphysics in the Discourse. Section 2 deals with the new argumentative path Descartes draws for the Meditations and with the new role that he assigns to the inference about the mind’s non-physical nature after the cogito. In section 3, I contend that the ‘prejudice strategy’ structures Meditation Two and, partially, Six. Section 4 shows that Descartes himself reveals this in his Replies to the Second and the Fifth Set of Objections. In section 5, I delve into Descartes’s foundational theory of the ‘prejudice strategy,’ i.e. his theory of infancy as set out especially in the Replies to the Sixth Set of Objections.

The Question of Truth in Pedro da Fonseca: the Problem of the simplex apprehensio and the Foundation of Logical Identities. This article deals with the theory of truth in Pedro da Fonseca (1528-1599) as it is presented in his commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics (1577-1612). The first part of the paper is dedicated to Fonseca’s definition of intellective truth within the doctrinal topography of the Aristotelian tradition. The Author especially points out Fonseca’s attempt to justify the notion of a “simple” truth of the “simple apprehension”, based on a specific use of Cajetan’s distinction between “signified act” and “exercised act” as well as on a (partially) nominalist account of the relationship between “simple” and “enunciative” concepts. The second part deals instead with Fonseca’s definition of transcendental truth, understood as the conformity between the intellect and the esse realis of the res, and as the conformity of the latter with exemplars in God’s mind. Here the Author also reconstructs Fonseca’s theory of divine ideas and his theory of logical identities.

The use of digital tracking technologies is a widespread phenomenon. Millions of people around the world now track, document, and analyse their physical activities, vital functions, and daily habits through wearable devices, apps, and platforms. The aim is to assess and improve health, productivity, and wellbeing. The current Covid-19 pandemic has accelerated the uptake of tracking technologies. At the heart of this trend lies the quantification of the body, deemed as a key element in medical practice and personal self-care. While often couched in positive promotional terms that highlight its value to users' mental, emotional, and physical health, it is also raising a host of issues and concerns that are at once ontological, ethical, political, social, legal, economic, and aesthetic. The Quantification of Bodies in Health aims to deepen understanding of this growing phenomenon and of the role of self-tracking practices in everyday life. It brings together established and emerging authors working at the intersection of philosophy, sociology, history, psychology, and digital culture, while bridging between philosophical and empirical approaches. A timely topic of extreme relevance and significance, The Quantification of Bodies in Health constitutes a useful and unique companion for anyone interested in the study of body quantification and self-tracking practices.

In this paper, I address Francisco Suárez's solution to the problem of the angelic assumption of artificial bodies, dealing in particular with the discussion in his De Angelis (book 4, chapters 33-39). The peculiarity of Suárez's approach lies, in particular, in the fact that it is one of the last major attempts to reformulate scholastic angelology from the ground up, taking into account the new spirit of the Counter-Reformation. Despite this goal, Suárez consistently discusses these issues taking into account Aquinas' earlier discussions, to which I refer presenting the Uncommon Doctor's ideas. I also provide some final remarks on the notion of the body that Suárez's angelology leaves to 17th-century philosophy.

A widespread historiographical portrayal represented Descartes' dualism as constituted in direct contrast with Aquinas' concept of soul-form. In the wake of the many studies that have opposed this prejudice in recent decades, this book reconstructs the fifteenth and seventeenth-century debate on psychology, focusing primarily on the Jesuit context and on the intersection between Aristotelianism, Platonism, and Augustinianism in early modern France. Beginning with a rigorous investigation of the theories of the separated soul, particular attention is then given to the indirect derivation of the Cartesian cogito and innatism from angelological themes of the time. Indeed, in the years in which Descartes elaborates his metaphysics, the immediate proximity between souls and angels is somehow a matter of fact, in the light of which many of the argumentative choices of the Meditations, and even the relationship that closely joins the "thinking substance" with the body-machine, appear clear.

This volume is the first collection of essays in English devoted to Pedro da Fonseca SJ (1527-1599), his intellectual endeavour, and thought. The book brings together some of today's leading specialists in early modern scholasticism, Portuguese Aristotelianism, and the history of the Society of Jesus, in order to present a reliable portrait of Fonseca's institutional role, to reconstruct his thought on many important aspects of scholastic metaphysics, and to discuss the reception of his work in the early modern age.

How are the contemporary conceptions of the living body and health related to numerical systems? Addressing the contemporary practice of quantification of bodies and health, such a question is bound to arise. As a discipline historically positioned amidst natural sciences, technology, and art, medicine has always been sensitive to theories and apparatuses able to quantify and reshape the living body, as well as to the practical possibility of operating on it. This is why, in the era where telecommunication, algorithmic information technology, and data-driven decision making are reaching their apex, new forms of medical practice, and new alliances between medicine and technology are emerging as a direct consequence of the evolution of technology. This is what was particularly aimed at by the International Congress "The Quantification of Bodies. Organism, Health, and Representation", which took place at the University of Coimbra on 28-29 November 2019, organized by the IEF - Institute for Philosophical Studies. The present book collects some of the papers presented there, selected according to their interdisciplinary approach and/or to their more informative nature, suitable even for non-specialist readers. A collection that reflects, in a fragment, many of the potentialities opened by this new field of studies.

This essay focuses on the ontology of the virtual, looking especially at its historical connection with today’s technology. The work begins by discussing the metaphysical structure of the Aristotelian dynamis, understood as the conceptual root of the Latin virtus. Reading Aristotle, especially through bergsonian concepts, I show how his dynamis allows a proto-deterministic account of spontaneity, strictly related to goal-oriented processes of human serial production and with the possibility of a homogeneous area of manipulation. Thus we stress how the ‘reproductive’ model works in every ontological account of the virtual and especially in the Renaissance ones, connected with the idea of a full “enginerization” of the real. The core of metaphysical virtuality seems to lie rather in an ontological account of “form” that denies its processual becoming and its process of stabilization through an infrastructure. Finally, I reject any ontological use of the virtual in teleonomy, especially in its metaphysical attempt to identify autopoiesis and mechanism, and I conclude by stressing how current digital technology is fully oriented to the reproductive model, conceptually rooted in a metaphysical account of the virtual.

This edited volume explores the intersection of medicine and philosophy throughout history, calling attention to the role of quantification in understanding the medical body. Retracing current trends and debates to examine the quantification of the body throughout the early modern, modern and early contemporary age, the authors contextualise important issues of both medical and philosophical significance, with chapters focusing on the quantification of temperaments and fluids, complexions, functions of the living body, embryology, and the impact of quantified reasoning on the concepts of health and illness. With insights spanning from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth century, this book provides a wide-ranging overview of attempts to ‘quantify’ the human body at various points. Arguing that medicine and philosophy have been constantly in dialogue with each other, the authors discuss how this provided a strategic opportunity both for medical thought and philosophy to refine and further develop. Given today’s fascination with the quantification of the body, represented by the growing profusion of self-tracking devices logging one’s sleep, diet or mood, this collection offers an important and timely contribution to an emerging and interdisciplinary field of study.

Also known as the "Portuguese Aristotle", Pedro da Fonseca S. J. (1527-1599) was a prominent figure in early modern Scholasticism and particularly in the history of the Society of Jesus. He took part in the writing of the Society's Ratio Studiorum and laid the groundwork for the publication of the famous Cursus Conimbricensis (1592-1606). Furthermore, he was the author of an influential handbook of logic and dialectics (the Institutionum Dialecticarum, 1564), in addition to being one of the most important and recognized commentators on Aristotle's Metaphysics in the sixteenth century (by his unfinished Commentaria, 1577-1612). This volume is the first collection of essays in English devoted to Fonseca, to his intellectual production, and his thought. The book gathers nine essays from scholars worldwide, among which are some of the most important current specialists in early modern Scholasticism, in Portuguese Aristotelianism, and the history of the Society of Jesus. So the volume presents, for the first time, a reliable portrait of the institutional role and the thought of Fonseca about many important questions of Western Metaphysics, as well as the reception of his work in the early modern age.

For Christian theology, the survival of the soul after the death of the body is a matter of fact. However, its philosophical explanation is probably the most peculiar issue of Thomas Aquinas’ radically Aristotelianaccount of body-soul. For both Augustine and Avicenna – who, together with Aristotle, can be considered the main sources of thirteenth century philosophy – the certainty of the immaterial soul’s ability to survive independently from the body was so strong that, coining their very own notions of human spiritual substance, they described it as only partially implied in the act of the body’s information. This account was able to mediate between Aristotle’s idea of the soul as a form of the body and the Neoplatonic theory of the soul as an independent substance....

This paper delves into a pivotal issue of scholastic angelology, the problem of angelic self-knowledge. It compares positions ranging from Thomas Aquinas’s to João Poinsot’s. I stress in particular what I dub ‘the problem of immanent knowledge in presence’, i.e. the problem of the actual, immanent and presential interplay between the angelic intellect and the angelic substance, which Aquinas sees as the rationale for angelic self-knowledge. I then discuss the perspectives of Cajetan and Vázquez, which revolve around the identity between the angelic intellect and the angelic substance, and how they should interact so to enable self-knowledge in the angelic intellect. I finally deal with Poinsot’s account of the problem and its strong rebuttal to Vázquez. Poinsot’s view champions Aquinas’s original doctrine and is grounded upon the notions of “radical intellect” and “intelligible identity”.

​Rintracciare con esattezza, nelle Meditazioni, la presenza di specifiche fonti letterarie è un'impresa audace e per certi versi poco utile. Considerata la riluttanza di Descartes a sottomettere il proprio pensiero a ogni genealogia e preso atto dello straordinario eclettismo che anima il Barocco (categoria culturale oltretutto sfuggente per definizione), sembra vano un tentativo di fissare definitivamente i richiami e le atmosfere che attraversano l'opera. Il rischio è anzitutto quello di mantenere indistinto ciò che è nell'autore da quanto è nel suo tempo o è la tentazione contraria, forse più grave, di smembrare il pensiero cartesiano in una sequenza di rimandi semplicemente possibili. Non si può negare legittimità alla questione, tuttavia, laddove il campo di indagine sia ristretto all'eventualità di una funzione – narrativa, scenica, simbolica – assegnata da Descartes ad alcuni aspetti della visione barocca del mondo, che sembrano proporre, in decisivi punti di snodo delle Meditazioni, momenti di autentico teatro. Questa impostazione della ricerca ci spinge a considerare il capolavoro cartesiano ancor prima che una dissertazione di metafisica – e difficilmente questa definizione ne esaurisce l'essenza – come un vero e proprio elaborato filosofico-letterario, non privo di peculiarità narrative e stilistiche tipicamente barocche, quali l'uso strategico della “dissimulazione” e una certa vena ermetica.

Il corso sulla Storia dell'idea di tempo, tenuto al Collège de France nel 1902-1903, per la prima volta tradotto interamente in italiano, è dedicato al concetto di tempo nella storia della filosofia antica e moderna. In queste straordinarie lezioni Bergson si confronta con Platone, Aristotele, Plotino, Galileo, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Newton e Kant. Nel cuore della metafisica occidentale il filosofo francese intravede una fondamentale negazione del tempo, impropriamente considerato come imitazione e riduzione di un’originaria eternità, inattingibile nell’immediato e esperibile solo per il tramite di un apparato simbolico. Alla luce di questa paradossale “falsa partenza” del pensiero occidentale, Bergson indica nella storia della metafisica la costante riproposizione dei suoi errori fondativi; ma vi intravede anche l’inesorabile cammino concettuale che, progressivamente, riconduce il tempo alla sua natura psicologica, quella della durata.

According to one of the most influential definitions, formulated by Michel Foucault in his Les anormaux, the monster is, since the Middle Ages, a violation of a “bio-juridical” order. In critically discussing the historical plausibility of this claim this article explores medical and philosophical conceptions of monsters between medieval and early modern period, addressing in particular the matter of the relationships between first and second causes in nature's errors. The main authors dealt with are Thomas Aquinas, Ambroise Paré, Francisco Toledo and Fortunio Liceti. What emerges is that up to the 17 th century monsters were always conceived as products – and not as real contradictions – of a nature ordered by God's will, goodness and perfection, without a real “bio-juridical” order (as Foucault thinks).