Stephan Schmid

Den thematischen Schwerpunkt dieses Bandes bilden finale Ursachen und teleologische Erklärungen. Die Artikel verbinden systematische Fragen und historische Perspektiven in einer sehr fruchtbaren Weise. Die systematischen Kernfragen lauten u.a.: Was ist die Relation von teleologischen und kausalen Erklärungen? Wie können wir unserer gemeinsamen Praxis Rechnung tragen, der gemäß wir teleologische Erklärungen sowohl für menschliche als auch für nichtmenschliche Verhaltensweisen verwenden? Ist Teleologie eine biologische Struktur oder ist sie lediglich ein Produkt unserer Art und Weise, die Ereignisse in der Welt begrifflich zu organisieren? Diese aktuellen Fragen werden in historischen Zusammenhängen präsentiert, wobei die Diskussion in diesem Band mit Thomas von Aquin beginnt und dann einen Schwerpunkt in der neuzeitlichen Philosophie hat, vor allem bei Spinoza und Kant. The authors: Marcos G. Breuer, Jasper Doomen, Boris Hennig, Paul Hoffman (†), Dominik Perler, Pauline Phemister, Marianne Schark, Stephan Schmid, Justin Steinberg, Georg Toepfer, Liesbet Vanhaute, Arthur Ward, Markus Wild

Even though early modern philosophers often harshly criticized the Aristotelian practice of explaining physical processes in terms of bodily powers, they showed almost no concern to adopt their traditional language of faculties when it came to describing and explaining the operations of the mind. Virtually all of them were happy to conceive of the mind as being endowed with faculties such as the will, the intellect, imagination, and memory. Despite their agreement on the principal legitimacy of such language, though, they widely disagreed about its correct interpretation. What does such language actually refer to? And does it refer to anything in reality at all? The chapter reconstructs the answers given by Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Hume and thereby presents four surprisingly different views about the ontological commitment of the traditional talk of cognitive faculties.

In contemporary metaphysics the notion of grounding plays a crucial role, and though its precise meaning is debated, there seems to be a widespread consensus that grounding is the same in all its typical instances. In this chapter I show that the late scholastic philosopher Francisco Suárez (1549–1617) can be seen as challenging this consensus since he gives an altogether different account of the way vital capacities are “grounded” in their underlying soul and the way the truth of a thought is “grounded” in its object: while a vital capacity is something over and above the soul, from which it “naturally results,” the truth of a thought is no additional entity apart from the thought and its object, in which it is “founded.” So, in addition to contributing two intriguing accounts of vital capacities and truth, Suárez’s theories of natural resultance and foundation make an interesting case for the possibility that grounding might not be a single and unified form of metaphysical dependence as contemporary metaphysicians seem to presuppose.

The notion of potentiality was central in Aristotelian philosophy, which scholastic thinkers heavily relied on. Nonetheless, the notion of a natural potentiality increasingly lost its explanatory relevance in the later middle ages, or so I will argue here with regard to Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham. While this notion plays a pivotal role in Aquinas’s account of contingency and natural teleology, Scotus and Ockham tried to account for these phenomena without appeal to natural potentialities of substances. Instead they maintained that contingency arises from the free operation of the will and that processes can only be teleologically directed towards certain ends if they are performed or arranged with an awareness of these ends by a rational agent. In this vein, late medieval authors tended to deprive natural potentialities of some of their explanatory tasks and assigned them to the rational capacities of God and other rational beings.

This book offers a selection of 13 case studies on how the notion of grounding helps illuminate philosophical discussions of our past with a special focus on debates of the Middle Ages. It thereby makes not only the case that the notion of grounding, which has become so widely debated in analytic metaphysics, has a long and venerable tradition, but also shows that this tradition has a lot to teach to contemporary philosophers of grounding. This is because the historical authors discussed in this volume – that is, Aristotle, Fazang, Boethius, Avicenna, Abelard, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Buridan, Suárez, Leibniz, and others – suggested different types of non-efficient-causal explanations which are to be carefully distinguished. This volume illustrates how philosophy and history of philosophy can be mutually illuminating by showing that the terminology developed in the contemporary debate about grounding can help reconstruct philosophical discussions from Antiquity up to the Early Modern Period, and that these very discussions enrich, and in part challenge the contemporary debate about grounding. In this vein, it is an important reading for everyone interested in the history of grounding and the philosophical insights that this history might have left to us.

Unlike many other early modern philosophers, Spinoza was not particularly troubled by scepticism. Spinoza's disdain for skeptics is backed up by remarkable epistemic confidence. Spinoza is thus concerned with at least three kinds of skeptics: with the methodological skeptic; the philosophical skeptic; with the fideist who gives epistemic priority to scripture or revelation over reason. The skeptic's recommendation to suspend one's judgment relies on a flawed metaphysical view of the thinking subject and its ideas. Spinoza has epistemological concerns about methodological skepticism. Descartes's strategy of employing methodological skepticism in order to convince his readers of the existence of certain truths is risky. Spinoza's dismissal of the skeptics is bolstered by a demanding notion of ideas as acts of understanding, which presuppose and explain the existence of their objects.

Thomas Aquinas is known for having endorsed the view that in our universe everything strives for a certain purpose. According to him not only rational agents act for the sake of specific ends, but every active substance does. It is this claim I reconstruct and discuss in this paper. I argue that it is based on Aquinas’ understanding of causality which is best – or so I suggest – conceived as a dispositional theory of causation. However, Aquinas does not only provide a natural philosophical account of natural teleology. Rather, he substantiates this account by embedding the phenomenon of natural teleology into a monotheistic framework. As I will point out, this move leads to a severe tension in Aquinas’ theory of natural teleology and ultimately threatens to deprive him of his ability to account for the natural substances’ intrinsic teleology. Thomas von Aquin vertrat die Ansicht, dass in unserem Universum alles einen bestimmten Zweck anstrebt. Nicht nur rationale Akteure seien um eines gewissen Ziels tätig, sondern jede aktive Substanz. Hier rekonstruiere und diskutiere ich diese Ansicht. Ich führe aus, dass sie auf Thomas’ Kausalitätsverständnis beruht, das man am besten im Rahmen einer dispositionalen Kausalitätstheorie deuten sollte. Mit Rückgriff auf seinen Monotheismus liefert Thomas neben einer naturphilosophischen Erklärung auch eine theologische Erklärung der Naturteleologie. Wie ich argumentiere, führt diese theologische Einbettung der Naturteleologie zu einer Spannung, welche schließlich die Annahme intrinsischer Teleologie problematisch macht.

Characterized by many historically significant events, such as the invention of the printing press, the discovery of the New World, and the Protestant Reformation, the years between 1300 and 1600 are a remarkably rich source of ideas about the mind. They witnessed a resurgence of Aristotelianism and Platonism and the development of humanism. However, philosophical understanding of the complex arguments and debates during this period remain difficult to grasp. Philosophy of Mind in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance provides an outstanding survey of philosophy of mind in this fascinating and still controversial period and examines the thought of figures such as Aquinas, Suárez, and Ficino. Following an introduction by Stephan Schmid, thirteen specially commissioned chapters by an international team of contributors discuss key topics, thinkers, and debates, including: mind and method, the mind and its illnesses, the powers of the soul, Averroism, intentionality and representationalism, theories of consciousness, will and its freedom, external and internal senses, Renaissance theories of the passions, the mind-body problem and the rise of dualism, and the 'cognitive turn'. Essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy of mind, medieval philosophy, and the history of philosophy, Philosophy of Mind in the Late Middle Ages and Renaissance is also a valuable resource for those in related disciplines such as religion, literature, and Renaissance studies.

By reconstructing the teleological conceptions of Thomas Aquinas, Suarez, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, the author argues against the common view that mechanical philosophers in the Early Modern Period rejected natural teleology because of its association with an Aristotelian picture of the world. First, many thinkers in the Early Modern Period did not reject teleological explanations for natural phenomena. Second, many scholastic thinkers already believed that pure natural teleology was problematic because they held that authentic teleological explanations are only possible when goals can be recognized."