The volume explores the relationship of artists and intellectuals from ancient Greece to modern times.

The late medieval discussion of 'nobility' (= nobilitas, dignitas) defined in philosophical terms (as opposed to other social notions like 'aristocracy'), produced a large number of writings, many of which are still unedited. Nevertheless, modern philosophical historiography (developed throughout the seventeenth century and reaching its first apogee with Hegel) has neglected the conceptual debates on nobility. Perhaps having assumed it to be a dead relic of the 'pre-illuminist' past, historians and philosophers understood 'nobility' as a non-philosophical issue and so it (...) still appears in contemporary scholarship. The first aim of this essay is to draw attention to this issue by presenting a sort of preliminary catalogue of the different types of conceptualizations of 'mobility'. By exploring the meanings and philosophical employment of the expressions 'bene nasci' and 'bene natus', this article also reveals a new aspect of the Aristotelian notion of magnanimity. (shrink)

Résumé – Cette note vise à mettre en évidence une « fonction Dante » dans l’œuvre du philosophe allemand Georg Simmel (1858-1918). L’intérêt précoce de Simmel pour les écrits et la pensée de Dante Alighieri est bien documenté. Dante a accompagné Simmel depuis le début de sa carrière (en 1884, il a publié une étude consacrée à « La psychologie de Dante ») jusqu’à ses écrits de maturité. Bien que cet aspect n’ait pas encore été approfondi par les chercheurs, il (...) est possible de montrer la présence d’une inspiration singulière et durable qui, née de la méditation de l’œuvre de Dante, aurait conduit le penseur allemand à approfondir des éléments essentiels de sa propre vision philosophique. (shrink)

This article has a twofold aim. On the one hand, it will seive as an introduction to the three essays by Johannes Bartuschat, Luca Bianchi and Paolo Falzone. In this sense, it provides an updated survey of the educational milieu in thirteenth century Tuscany and presents a sketch of Dante’s broader intellectual climate, quickly touching on a few instances of philosophical learning that Dante elaborated on: the hierarchy of knowledge and his conception of Christian Skepticism. On the other hand, these (...) pages try to draw a more individual profile of Dante as a thinker and involve the existential relevance of issues like that of ”recognized dignity’. Here, I will also suggest an unusual approach to look at Dante’s original philosophical project: i.e., a robust effort to draw the last implications from a radical understanding of Love. (shrink)

Francis of Marchia dealt at length in several different contexts with the nature of the will and willing. Here I examine just one of those discussions: the possibility for the will to go against reason's final judgment, a topic related to weakness of will and the source of sin. Marchia is clearly of a voluntaristic bent, holding that the will can indeed act against the determination of reason. After examining Marchia's argumentation for his position, I explore some of the background (...) to Marchia's view in a distinctively later medieval understanding of the human mind as a system of internal acts and dispositions, with the possibility that several of them belong to the same faculty simultaneously. This increasingly complex conceptualisation of the mind mirrors a new, more complex conceptualization of the "Self". (shrink)

In the last decades of the twentieth century universities in Europe and other OECD countries have undergone a profound transformation. They have evolved from mainly élite institutions for teaching and research to large (public and private) organisations responsible for mass higher education and the production and distribution of new knowledge. Increasingly, new knowledge is produced by universities not only for its own sake but also for potential economic gains.

The Arabic philosophical tradition played an important role in the formation of theological, philosophical and scientific thought in medieval Europe subsequent to the translations from Arabic into Latin in the 12th and 13th centuries. The influence of that Arabic classical rationalist tradition in works by al-Farabi, Avicenna, Averroes and the Liber de causis is evident in the thought of Thomas Aquinas, though the breadth and depth of that influence is often insufficiently noted and explained by scholars of Aquinas. This course (...) focuses on the metaphysics, epistemology and psychology of Aquinas in the development of his philosophical conceptions of soul and intellect in the context of his use of sources in Aristotle and works by philosophers of the Arabic tradition, particularly Avicenna and Averroes. Readings are selected from writings from each of the four major periods of his career starting with his first major work, the Commentary on the Sentences. The course was planned to be taught at Marquette, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven and the Universidad Panamericana as a hybrid course. That is, it was taught using online tools and resources and also in the classroom with face-to-face meetings once per week. And it was taught at Marquette, KU Leuven and the Universidad Panamericana simultaneously. On Thursdays students met online with video and audio for questions and discussion with Profs. Taylor, Robiglio and López-Farjeat and the student groups in Milwaukee, Leuven and Mexico City live. (shrink)

The present volumes unites papers which explore the European image of god in an intercultural context. They range from classical antiquity to contemporary philosophy and science.

Il contributo intende mettere in primo piano il ruolo svolto dall'analogia nel _modus operandi_, oltre che nel_ modus arguendi_, dei giuristi medievali. Se ne propone inoltre una lettura "a più livelli" nell'ottica de _Il paradigma filosofico agostiniano_ (Parodi 2006). _This essay means to put the spotlight on the role that analogy played in medieval jurists' _modus operandi _and _modus arguendi_, suggesting a multi-level reading of it as well, from the point of view of _Il paradigma filosofico agostiniano_ (Parodi 2006)._.

The present volumes unites papers which explore the European image of god in an intercultural context. They range from classical antiquity to contemporary philosophy and science.

This article presents two case-studies that shed light on the silent yet significant role an editor might play in the reception of Renaissance texts and the place of Thomas Aquinas therein. Both studies take up texts from fifteenth-century Italy. The first addresses the scholastic philosopher, Dominic of Flanders, suggesting that Dominic’s originality as a thinker may have been ‘corrected’ by an anonymous editor in order to maintain closer accord with Aquinas’s position; inquiry into the manuscript tradition uncovers instances of silent (...) intervention. The second addresses a Latin dialogue by the physician and humanist, Antonio de Ferraris (Galateo), drawing attention to a significant suppression of the interlocutor Thomas Aquinas, this time by a twentieth century editor. (shrink)

L’introduzione al fascicolo Analogia e medioevo sive vent’anni di analogie presenta il numero 18 di "Doctor Virtualis" e traccia le tappe fondamentali della rivista. Si delineano dapprima alcune linee della storia della rivista e le sue ispirazioni teoriche e storiografiche principali, per poi mettere in luce le ragioni della rilevanza del tema dell’analogia, come oggetto utilizzato e pensato nei secoli medievali e come strumento di ricerca storiografica, e infine si conclude con l’articolazione del fascicolo. The introduction to the issue Analogy (...) and the Middle Ages sive twenty years of analogies presents issue n. 18 of Doctor Virtualis and traces the milestones of the journal. It first sketches some lines of the history of the journal and its main theoretical and historiographical inspirations, then highlights the reasons for the relevance of the theme of analogy, as an object used and thought of in the medieval centuries and as a tool for historiographical research, and finally concludes with the articulation of the issue. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the prospects of a Neo-Aristotelian position—according to which the difference between the human species and non-human animals is a difference in ‘form’—in the context of the question of how the human form of life is related to the idea of education. Two interpretations of this idea have been suggested by contemporary Neo-Aristotelian philosophy that offer contrasting accounts of the role played by education. According to the first, the idea of a formal difference goes with a (...) notion of potentiality, according to which the distinctiveness of the human is mainly a product of education, and hence a matter of second nature. According to the second, the idea of the human is the idea of a formally distinctive kind of first nature that explains the very possibility of education. I maintain that both interpretations do justice to an important aspect of human life yet fail fully to grasp the significance of the notion of ‘form’ that they employ. I argue that to embrace the insight that the difference of the human is a difference in ‘form’, we must think of the human as a form of life whose very concept contains the concept of education. The concept of education, I argue, is a logical concept, contained in the concept of life that it describes. (shrink)

In this paper we try to convert the mathematician who calls himself, or herself, “a formalist” to a position we call “meth-odological pluralism”. We show how the actual practice of mathe-matics fits methodological pluralism better than formalism while preserving the attractive aspects of formalism of freedom and crea-tivity. Methodological pluralism is part of a larger, more general, pluralism, which is currently being developed as a position in the philosophy of mathematics in its own right.1 Having said that, henceforth, in this (...) paper, we abbreviate “methodological pluralism” with “pluralism”. (shrink)

The main aim of this article is to offer a sociological concept of crisis that, defined as the expected yet non-lineal outcome of the internal dynamics of modern societies, builds on the synergies between critical theory and systems theory. It contends that, notwithstanding important differences, both traditions concur in addressing crises as a form of self-reproduction of social systems as much as a form of engagement with the complexities and effects of such processes of reproduction. In order to make our (...) comparison exhaustive, this article explores critical and systems theories’ notions of crisis at three levels: (1) their conceptual delimitation of crises; (2) their methodological proposals to empirically observe crises; and (3) their normative attempts to contribute to their resolution. As crises remain a distinctive structural feature of the social world and a rich source of knowledge about it, reflexivity must be seen as a crucial form of engagement with the negative expressions of social life itself. (shrink)

Our aim in this paper is to employ conceptual negotiation to inform a method of rethinking defective food concepts, that is concepts that fail to suitably represent a certain food-related domain or that offer representations that run counter to the interests of their users. We begin by sorting out four dimensions of a food concept: the data upon which it rests and the methodology by which those data are gathered; the ontology that sustains it; the social acts that serve to (...) negotiate and establish the concept; and the aims and values that it fosters. We then discuss the conditions that make a food concept defective, pointing out four types of defects—fragility, polarization, incoherence, and schizophrenia—which we illustrate by means of two specific examples: local food and healthy food. (shrink)

The book's aim is to give a working representation of what metaphysics is today. The historical contributions reveal the roots of metaphysical themes and how today's methods are linked to their Aristotelian and Leibnizian past. The volume also touches on the relationships between ontological and linguistic analysis, the questions of realism and ontological commitment, the nature of abstract objects, the existential meaning of particular quantification, the primitiveness of identity, the question of epistemic versus ontological vagueness, the necessity of origin, the (...) nature of natural necessity, the possibility of intermittent existence, the notion of a temporal part and its place in an account of persistence, the question of identity and change across time and possible worlds, and many more. Readership: A toolbox for any researcher in metaphysics and an essential source for any PhD student with ontological interests. (shrink)

Social science inquiries of American agriculture have long recognized the inextricability of farm households and farm businesses. Efforts to train and support farmers, however, often privilege business realm indicators over social issues. Such framings implicitly position households as disconnected from farm stress or farm success. This article argues that systematically tracing the pathways between farm households and farm operations represents a potentially powerful inroad towards identifying effective support interventions. We argue childcare arrangements are an underrecognized challenge through which farm household (...) dynamics directly influence agricultural production. We draw on interviews and focus group data with farmers in the Northeastern United States to understand how farmer–parents access and negotiate childcare. Farmer–parents value raising children on farms, but express reluctance to expect current or future labor from them. Years with young children thus represent an especially vulnerable phase during a farm’s trajectory. We identify and analyze social, economic, and cognitive pathways through which childcare impacts farm operations. Social pathways include relationship tensions and gendered on-farm divisions of labor; economic pathways include farm layout and structure; cognitive pathways include how farmers think about and plan for their operations. Explicitly acknowledging such issues can better equip farmer–parents to anticipate and plan for conflicting demands on their time. (shrink)

Topics in Cognitive Science, Volume 14, Issue 1, Page 6-13, January 2022.