This article discusses the theories of perception of Robert Kilwardby and Peter of John Olivi. Our aim is to show how in challenging certain assumptions of medieval Aristotelian theories of perception they drew on Augustine and argued for the active nature of the soul in sense perception. For both Kilwardby and Olivi, the soul is not passive with respect to perceived objects; rather, it causes its own cognitive acts with respect to external objects and thus allows the subject to perceive (...) them. We also show that Kilwardby and Olivi differ substantially regarding where the activity of the soul is directed to and the role of the sensible species in the process, and we demonstrate that there are similarities between their ideas of intentionality and the attention of the soul towards the corporeal world. (shrink)

Robert Kilwardby on the Human Soul examines Kilwardby’s role in conciliating Aristotelian and Augustinian views on the soul, soul-body relation, and cognition.

Robert Kilwardby is a central figure in late medieval philosophy and theology, but key areas of his thought still remain unexamined in a systematic way. This book offers a comprehensive overview of his works, ranging from topics in logic to theology, done in a way that is accessible to non-specialists and to anyone interested in medieval thought.

The study of perception and the role of the senses have recently risen to prominence in philosophy and are now a major area of study and research. However, the philosophical history of the senses remains a relatively neglected subject. Moving beyond the current philosophical canon, this outstanding collection offers a wide-ranging and diverse philosophical exploration of the senses, from the classical period to the present day. Written by a team of international contributors, it is divided into six parts: -/- Perception (...) from Non-Western Perspectives Perception in the Ancient Period Perception in the Medieval Latin/Arabic Period Perception in the Early Modern Period Perception in the Post-Kantian Period Perception in the Contemporary Period. The volume challenges conventional philosophical study of perception by covering a wide range of significant, as well as hitherto overlooked, topics, such as perceptual judgment, temporal and motion illusions, mirror and picture perception, animal senses and cross-modal integration. By investigating the history of the senses in thinkers such as Plotinus, Auriol, Berkeley and Cavendish; and considering the history of the senses in diverse philosophical traditions, including Chinese, Indian, Byzantine, Greek and Latin it brings a fresh approach to studying the history of philosophy itself. -/- Including a thorough introduction as well as introductions to each section by the editors, The Senses and the History of Philosophy is essential reading for students and researchers in the history of philosophy, perception, philosophy of mind, philosophical psychology, aesthetics and eastern and non-western philosophy. It will also be extremely useful for those in related disciplines such as psychology, religion, sociology, intellectual history and cognitive sciences. (shrink)

Perception of the external world is an essential part of the animal (including human) life, both as a source of knowledge and as a way to survive. Medieval authors accepted this view, and despite general concerns about the reliability of the senses in the acquisition of certain and objective knowledge, they thought that for the most part our perceptual system gets things right when it comes to the perceptual features of things—but not always. Our article focuses on thirteenth- and fourteenth-century (...) philosophical discussions of illusions and other types of perceptual errors. Reception of incorrect information, misjudgments concerning perceptual objects, the binding problem, and similar cases that explain perceptual errors will be analyzed. We discuss what might be called medieval Aristotelian/Avicennian theories of perception and the internal senses (drawing mainly from Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas), as well as the so-called perspectivist accounts of perception, especially that by Alhacen. Finally, we take up a debate between Peter Auriol and his critics, which contains elements that can be seen as precursors of later skeptical worries. The concern here is that, just like in contemporary discussions leading to disjunctivism, the absence of a secure way to distinguish between veridical and non-veridical perception leads to a general worry about the reliability of our experience of the world. (shrink)

Recent scholarship has focused on the notion of ‘rationality’ and the consequences of different conceptions to the characterization of the human-animal divide. In this article, I attempt to further muddle the waters by considering examples of stricter requirements being imposed on what counts to be rational. I argue that whereas many medieval authors were willing to identify similarities in the way humans and non-human animals behave and process information, they also tended to emphasize the differences in those processes: human processes (...) are inherently rational (or rational-oriented), while those of other animals may resemble rational processes but are not rational. I further claim that this evidence should lead scholars to be less generous in their attribution of rationality to non-human animals to avoid trivializing that notion. (shrink)

According to the Aristotelian account of substantial change, that is, the corruption of one substance and the generation of another, prime matter must be found at the starting and at the end point of change, as that which persists throughout the change. But knowing that matter remains as the substrate of change tells us little about the nature of this matter, which constitutes both the corrupted substance and the new generated substance. Among the questions we can ask about its nature (...) are whether prime matter is an entity of its own apart from form; whether it is one in all those individual material substances or is somehow divided or partitioned into different parts. Early commentaries on the Physics and Metaphysics were interested in precisely these questions about the unity and divisibility of prime matter and about what kind of unity this may be. This article aims to investigate how authors from the English commentary tradition in the period 1250–1270 answered these questions. (shrink)

Despite being one of the major figures in late medieval thought and being the subject of numerous studies, certain topics concerning the Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa remain in need of further investigation. One of these is an aspect of his theory of cognition: his account of sense perception. It is our aim in this study to systematically look at his scattered remarks on the topic and make a number of suggestions as to the nature of his thought on how we (...) come to know external things. It is not our purpose to offer a comprehensive account of his theory of cognition. Our focus in this article is on his account of perception and the specific claim that Nicholas develops a model whereby reason operates together with the senses in perceptual experience. Despite being tentative our claim is grounded on suggestions found in the scholarship on Cusanus; but these suggestions remain quite vague and in need of exploration. In this article, we closely examine the textual evidence and develop our claim based o... (shrink)

Books Received listing for: American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly: Journal of the American Catholic Philosophical Association. Winter2013, Vol. 87 Issue 1, p219-220. 2p.

In the present article I examine Robert Kilwardby’s reading of Augustine’s and Anselm’s theories of the verbum mentis. The article is divided into three sections. In the first, I examine how Kilwardby’s criterion for personal distinction within the divine Trinity is applied to the powers of the rational soul. Kilwardby considers Anselm’s understanding of the Augustinian solution unable to support the real distinction of persons. In the two remaining sections, I inspect the two models of thinking: thinking as speaking and (...) thinking as seeing. It will be argued that Kilwardby accepts the seeing model and rejects the speaking model. (shrink)

The aim of the present work is to show the roots of the conception of perception as an active process, tracing the history of its development from Plato to modern philosophy. The contributors inquire into what activity is taken to mean in different theories, challenging traditional historical accounts of perception that stress the passivity of percipients in coming to know the external world. Special attention is paid to the psychological and physiological mechanisms of perception, rational and non-rational perception and the (...) role of awareness in the perceptual process. Perception has often been conceived as a process in which the passive aspects - such as the reception of sensory stimuli - were stressed and the active ones overlooked. However, during recent decades research in cognitive science and philosophy of mind has emphasized the activity of the subject in the process of sense perception, often associating this activity to the notions of attention and intentionality. Although it is recognized that there are ancient roots to the view that perception is fundamentally active, the history remains largely unexplored. The book is directed to all those interested in contemporary debates in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology who would like to become acquainted with the historical background of active perception, but for historical reliability the aim is to make no compromises. (shrink)

New Blackfriars, Volume 102, Issue 1101, Page 623-636, September 2021.

Augustine is often credited for upholding a theory of active perception, whereby our acquaintance with ordinary material objects and their properties cannot be explained by the causal efficaciousness of these objects. In a previous work, I attempted to connect this theory with the account of perception found in his treatise On the Trinity. Mark Kalderon has challenged this ‘reconciliationist’ reading, claiming that in this work Augustine admits to a strong causal role of the object in bringing about perceptual experiences. In (...) this paper I stand by my original reading, with one important qualification: the object is a cause in determining the content of the act of perception, but not of the perceptual act or the activity of the soul in general. (shrink)

The articles in this issue are a selection of the papers presented at the conference Knowledge as Assimilation, held at the University of Helsinki on 9-11 June 2017. The conference was the result of a collaboration between two research groups that have been established in Finland and Sweden from 2013 onwards: the research project Rationality in Perception: Transformations of Mind and Cognition 1250-1550, funded by the European Research Council and hosted by the University of Helsinki, and the research programme Representation (...) and Reality: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives on the Aristotelian Tradition, funded by the Riksbankens jubileumsfond and located at the University of Gothenburg. (shrink)

Since Brentano, intentionality has become a key feature of debates within philosophy of mind and epistemology, expressing the directedness and the aboutness of mental acts. In recent decades, a wide range of studies has shown the historical background of this concept beyond the historical sources Brentano himself acknowledged. Augustine (354–430) has been prominently mentioned in some of these studies, the focus of which has mostly been on the aboutness aspect, that is to say on how this mental event is about (...) a particular thing. I think there is yet another side to Augustine’s account of intentionality and this is the general undetermined directedness of the soul to the world, which results from its way of being in the body. Such an account commits Augustine to a certain account of perception, one which does not accept that we are causally acted upon by material things, but rather suggests that we are the agents, and causes, of our own cognitive acts. This is true not only of Augustine but also of many medieval authors within the tradition of Augustinian philosophy of perception. The focus of this article is how this position is elaborated in some thinkers of the Middle Ages, namely Henry of Ghent (1217–1293) and Peter John Olivi (1248–1298). (shrink)

The general aim of this very welcome volume is to explore the relation between pragmatism and neuroscience. The thirteen chapters are evenly divided into four parts, roughly organized around the themes of brain and pragmatism, emotion and cognition, creativity and education, and ethics.The beginning chapter written by the editors attempts to show that advances in behavioral and brain sciences intersect core theses of pragmatism with regards to cognition and the mind-world relation. The basic assumption is that neuroscience and pragmatism share (...) a naturalist program: pragmatism refers all philosophical explanation to experimental science and neuroscience explains all.. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas describes embryological development as a succession of vital principles, souls, or substantial forms of which the last places the developing being in its own species. In the case of human beings this form is the rational soul. Aquinas' well-known commitment to the view that there is only one substantial form for each composite and that a substantial form directly informs prime matter leads to the conclusion that the succession of soul kinds is non-cumulative. The problem is that this (...) view seems to entail discontinuity in the process of generation. Aquinas argues for the continuity of a conceived being by appealing to the teleological argument at the core of Aristotle's embryogenesis theory: according to Aristotle, embryonic development is a gradual actualization of the form of the species, potentially present in the embryo from the outset. Aquinas denies such a gradualist account due to his metaphysical commitments , arguing instead that the .. (shrink)

How we come to know the external world has intrigued thinkers throughout the history of philosophy. Medieval philosophers understood that a theory of perception requires an account of the categorization of sensory information: to perceive things as being dangerous or beneficial and even as being individuals that belong to certain kinds (e.g., 'this is a dog'). A key question is whether this requires the intervention of rational cognitive capacities, cooperating with sensory ones in normal instances of perception. The contributions to (...) this volume investigate how thinkers from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries answer this and other related questions about human perception. Contributors are Fabrizio Amerini, Joel Biard, Veronique Decaix, Christian Kny, Lydia Schumacher, Josee Filipe Silva, and Jorg Alejandro Tellkamp. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss Robert Kilwardby’s theory of judgement and consider its implications for his view of truth and falsity. I start by considering Kilwardby’s claim that truth and falsity are primarily found in composite thought, i.e. judgement. I then examine his distinction between two different kinds of being, namely real and conceptual, arguing that different kinds of true judgement, according to Kilwardby, have different kinds of existential import, either real or merely conceptual. Since Kilwardby develops his position by (...) commenting on Aristotle’s logical treatises, an important aim of the article is that of showing how he addresses exegetical issues in those sources and offers solutions that go beyond Aristotle’s alleged intentions. The focus of the paper is on negative judgement because that is where Kilwardby diverges from Aristotle most conspicuously. (shrink)

In the late medieval period, the issue of the composed nature of human beings and its relation to medieval faculty psychology became central. There is ample scholarship on this topic, focusing primarily on authors such as the Dominicans Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas, and the Franciscans Alexander of Hales, Hugh of St. Cher, John of La Rochelle, and Peter John Olivi. In this paper, we want to examine the view of one of Olivi’s disciples, the Franciscan theologian Peter of (...) Trabibus (fl. 1290s), on the unity of the human soul and the nature of its powers, especially the powers of the intellect and the will. We are particularly interested in his application of the principle of plurality of substantial forms to explain the nature of the relation between the powers of the soul and its essence. (shrink)

Fortunately – and perhaps surprisingly, due to the size of a field which remains absent from most philosophy departments, especially in the Anglophone world – medieval philosophy is awash with exce...

The critical edition of Robert Kilwardby’s Notule libri Priorum by Thom and Scott is a great scholarly achievement. The edition of the thirteenth-century Dominican’s commentary to Aristotle’s Prior...