Vlad Ile

Late ancient and early medieval narratives often depict dreaming as a vertical and hierarchical process of influence that has its starting point in a higher entity and ends with the human being. This model of explanation seems to take a more horizontal approach with the advent of a new natural philosophy and medical works from Arabic milieu that put the psychosomatic processes of the human being into perspective. The general purpose of this paper is to assess to which extent Albert the Great’s consideration of dreams can be taken as an example of this turning point. Specifically, it tries to show how his dream theory is articulated in De homine. The main hypothesis is that the Dominican friar advocated a materialistic account of dreams, in which the process of dream formation is explain as a flux of bodiness caused by a change in the thermal behavior of the body.

Albert’s anthropology places the human being at the top of a hierarchy of living things in virtue of a unique feature – namely the intellect – that offers the possibility of transcending the changing realm of nature and of assimilating its possessor to their divine creator. Even though Albert, throughout his works, often defends the independence of the human intellect from matter and consequently from the body and senses, his works on natural philosophy seem to offer a different perspective. In De animalibus, Albert considers the brain to be the divine member of the body responsible for the operations of sensation and, to a certain degree, of intellection. Thus, the entire humoral activity of the human body has a direct influence on the activity of the intellect, his divine nature notwithstanding. Accordingly, the main purpose of the present study is to point out how the classical humoral theory is integrated by Albert the Great in his physiological consideration for an explanation of the intellect placed between the murky boundaries of natural philosophy and metaphysics.

Relatively recent literature on supposition theory seems to use different modern logical tools of interpretation that can be generally described as formalizations. Since the act of formalizing may be understood as a process of changing its object in the sense of making it more formal, an assessment of this kind of approaches is necessary. Accordingly, our main goal in this paper is to analyze the formality of Peter of Spain’s theory of supposition and to evaluate its interpretation as a quantification theory. Our main thesis is that although Peter’s theory presents certain weak notions of formality, the formality presupposed by the quantificational interpretation is nowhere to be found in his considerations.

In this paper I will try to analyze St. Augustine’s and Dante’s views towards history by showing how their visions can be articulated into particular models of history, i.e. a particular schema that describes the unfolding of history with its specific focal points, and to what extent this model differs from one author to another. If in Augustine’s case, by exploring his division of sacred history in component parts, that can be found throughout his work, I will argue for a Christocentric model, in Dante’s case, by analyzing his work on political philosophy, De monarchia, I will argue for a teleological model of history.

The present paper aims to reconsider our approaches to the suppositio theory (in the particular case of Peter of Spain`s Summaries of logic) in light of a new hypothesis of the double nature1 of medieval logic. Starting from the existing points of view, i.e. the theory of suppositio as a theory of reference and suppositio as a theory of an untranslatable, this paper will examine their underlying commitments to the nature of medieval logic. Such an analysis will entail for the former approach a commitment to a formal nature, while for the latter to a non-formal one. The possibility of a new approach emerges when both natures can be traced in Peter`s theory.

Albert’s anthropology places the human being at the top of a hierarchy of living things in virtue of a unique feature – namely the intellect – that offers the possibility of transcending the changing realm of nature and of assimilating its possessor to their divine creator. Even though Albert, throughout his works, often defends the independence of the human intellect from matter and consequently from the body and senses, his works on natural philosophy seem to offer a different perspective. InDe animalibus, Albert considers the brain to be the divine member of the body responsible for the operations of sensation and, to a certain degree, of intellection. Thus, the entire humoral activity of the human body has a direct influence on the activity of the intellect, his divine nature notwithstanding. Accordingly, the main purpose of the present study is to point out how the classical humoral theory is integrated by Albert the Great in his physiological consideration for an explanation of the intellect placed between the murky boundaries of natural philosophy and metaphysics.