Previously, the author tried to show that some arguments in one of the two versions of Nicholas of Autrecourt’s Quaestio de intensione visionis are taken almost verbatim from the anonymous Tractatus de sex inconvenientibus. This paper concentrates on the arguments themselves in order to consider two main issues: the ‘translatability’ of limit decision problems, manifest in Autrecourt’s juxtaposition of questions de maximo et minimo, de primo et ultimo instanti, and the intension and remission of forms; the importance (...) of Parisian discussions of limit decision problems prior to the adoption of the new analytical languages developed at Oxford. Thus, the paper is divided in two sections, the first concerning some arguments of Autrecourt’s question, the second focusing on the link between one of Autrecourt’s arguments and the medieval tradition of commentaries on Aristotle’s De caelo, in which it is possible to find some antecedents of the analytical approach that later Parisian scholars would apply to these problems. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Critical and skeptical environment Nominalism and skepticism Varieties of nominalism Principles Critique of the principle of causality Anthropology and ethics Conclusion.

This volume not only provides the first critical edition with an English translation of the famous correspondence of Nicholas of Autrecourt , but also an assessment of his views and the views of those to whom the letters were addressed.

According to the standard account of Nicholas' views,his scepticism is constrained by his commitment to the law of non-contradiction as a basis for certain truth. Such an account fails to distinguish the views found in the "Leters to Bernard" and the "Exigit Ordo" the latter clear rejects the law of non-contradiction and propounds a full fledged scepticism.

F. C. Copleston; XIV*—The Logical Empiricism of Nicholas of Autrecourt, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 74, Issue 1, 1 June 1974, Pages 249–262.

Volume 30, Issue 6, December 2022, Page 953-972.

The aim of this paper is to examine the medieval posterity of the Aristotelian and Pyrrhonian treatments of the infinite regress argument. We show that there are some possible Pyrrhonian elements in Autrecourt's epistemology when he argues that the truth of our principles is merely hypothetical. By contrast, Buridan's criticisms of Autrecourt rely heavily on Aristotelian material. Both exemplify a use of scepticism.

No. 20 in the Marquette series "Mediaecal [[sic]] Philosophical Texts in Translation," this translation is based on J. R. O’Donnell’s edition of the only extant manuscript of the Universal Treatise, and is preceded by a helpful introduction of 28 pp. plus a selected bibliography. An English version of this work should be welcomed by scholars not versed in Latin who are nonetheless interested in Nicholas’ thought, whether because of his highly critical reactions to Aristotle and Averroes or because of (...) certain similarities between his philosophical views and those of Hume. If the latter are primarily to be found in his two extant letters to Bernard of Arezzo, the former constitute the very heart of this work. It should also be noted that the Universal Treatise was originally intended to recall university professors, especially at Paris, to the study of Christianity and ethics. Written c. 1340, its attacks on Aristotle and Averroes were intended to contribute to this purpose. Nevertheless, some of the positions expressed therein were to bring Nicholas himself into conflict with ecclesiastical authority. Not least among these troublesome views from the standpoint of religious orthodoxy was the suggestion that all things are eternal. The situation was further complicated by Nicholas’ contention that not all the views found in the Treatise represent his own convictions. Many are to be taken as probable or more probable. In his attacks on Aristotle and Averroes he does not claim to disprove demonstratively what they held, but only to show that their opinions are less probable than those he advances. Granted that the chief unifying factor in this work is negative, its anti-Aristotelian and anti-Averroistic thrust, yet, as is suggested in the introduction, some kind of positive unifying theme is also at work, Nicholas’ view of the good. Since the universe must always contain the same amount of goodness, everything in it must remain in existence. Therefore the universe consists of unchangeable atoms. From this atomism follows the view that space consists of points and time of instants. Since change in quantity and place cannot produce or destroy real being, Nicholas must therefore hold that quantity is really identical with material substance and that movement is nothing but change in the position of atoms. Moreover, if things are eternal, it is probable that the same holds for the actions of the soul. As eternal such acts remain unchanged and hence do not vary in degree of intensity. They simply pass from person to person. Consequently, the same object cannot be seen clearly and obscurely. Nicholas also suggests that all things are as they appear, granted that such must be accepted not because it has been proved but because this conviction gives pleasure to the mind. Again, he argues that since a cause can produce only one kind of effect, not all things have been produced by God whether as their total or as their partial cause. He then suggests that because God’s power is infinite, no effect can be produced by him naturally. As finite such an effect would not be proportioned to his infinite power. His arguments against any kind of Averroistic theory of one separate intellect for all mankind are both interesting and unusual. In fact he appears to go to the opposite extreme, not only defending individual intellects for individual men but also suggesting that in one and the same soul there are as many intellects as concepts. That Nicholas himself saw some difficulties with this position may be inferred from his admonition that further thought be given to this matter. If the same might be said of other unusual theories advanced in the Treatise, its translators are to be commended for having made it available to English language readers.—J. F. W. (shrink)

Resumo : O presente artigo visa mostrar e analisar como se constituem alguns dos argumentos sobre a eternidade das coisas no tratado primeiro, capítulo De aeternitate rerum do Exigit ordo, de Nicolau de Autrécourt. Como o próprio título do capítulo diz, trata-se de um conjunto de argumentos que buscam justificar a eternidade das coisas. A estratégia utilizada por nós é reconstruir e mostrar como se constituem e se organizam tais argumentos sobre a eternidade das coisas, elucidando o postulado autrecuriano de (...) que é provável que todas as coisas, sem exceção, sejam eternas; e que o universo seja eterno e composto de átomos, e regido por apenas um movimento, a saber, o movimento local. Nossa interpretação buscará abordar a questão, reconstruindo a filosofia da natureza de Autrécourt e alguns enunciados epistemológicos e ontológicos elaborados por ele. Palavras-chave : eternidade das coisas; filosofia da natureza; Nicolau de Autrécourt. (shrink)

Nicholas of Autrecourt maintains in his second letter to Bernard of Arezzo that with the exception of the certitude of faith, there is no other certitude but the certitude of the law of non-contradiction, or the one that can be resolved to this law. The article examines this statement, which implies that natural theology is not possible. It comes to the conclusion that, in general, Nicholas in his letter seems to identify the relation "…can be resolved…" between (...) two certain sentences with the relation "…follows from…". This identification leads to problems which are discussed. Further, Nicholas says that in every valid inference the consequent is identical with the antecedent or is part of it. This can be understood in two ways. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Croire et savoir: Les principes de la connaissance selon Nicolas d’AutrécourtDallas G. Denery IIChristophe Grellard. Croire et savoir: Les principes de la connaissance selon Nicolas d’Autrécourt. Paris: J. Vrin, 2005. Pp. 313. Paper, €38,00.Nicholas of Autrecourt has often seemed to be one of those philosophers doomed to be best known for everything but their own ideas. Famously, if inaccurately, dubbed "the Medieval Hume" by one of (...) his first modern critics, the threat or fear of skepticism has in one way or another shaped most subsequent studies of Nicholas's work. While understandable, this really is unfortunate. Nicholas himself clearly states that his philosophical goal was to avoid the skeptical consequences that he believed were latent in the writings of his scholastic peers. In this excellent new work, the first monograph-length study devoted to Nicholas's thought in nearly 60 years, Christophe Grellard goes a long way towards recovering Nicholas's very real contributions to fourteenth-century intellectual life.Any attempt to interpret Nicholas's thought runs up against one significant problem—few of his works survive. All that remains are a fascinating and lengthy (not to mention, confusing and unfinished) work of natural philosophy, Exigit ordo, and several letters touching on issues in epistemology, cognition, and logic. As a result, even situating Nicholas's thought within the proper intellectual currents of the first decades of the fourteenth century has proven difficult. Whose work influenced him? Who were the objects of his criticism? What were his motives? Until recently, most scholars have attempted to trace the influence of William Ockham on Nicholas's thought. Drawing from recent work on the University of Paris during the fourteenth century, Grellard not only downplays Ockham's influence on Nicholas, but also Nicholas's membership in the faculty of theology. Rather, he stresses Nicholas's ongoing involvement in the arts faculty, where he continued to teach even as he studied for his degree in theology. This has two significant consequences. First, it allows Grellard to treat all of Nicholas's writings as contributions to the practice of natural philosophy. Indeed, in his compelling first chapter, Grellard contends that the initial sections of the Exigit, in which Nicholas famously condemns scholastic Aristotelianism as nothing more than an institutionalized pedagogy of error and untruth, must be read as a plea for a distinction between philosophy and theology, between speculation and faith. Even if Nicholas was not alone at the time in pushing for these distinctions (Ockham and John Buridan had argued along similar lines), Grellard demonstrates that Nicholas's approach was certainly the more radical and extreme. Second, the shift in focus from theology to arts brings with it a shift in Nicholas's most important interlocutors. To begin, Aristotle and Averroes become constant background forces in Nicholas's thought. Moreover, as the final section of Grellard's work makes clear, many of Nicholas's ideas are most usefully understood in light of writings of two other arts masters, John Buridan and Nicole Oresme, rather than in the context of debates among his contemporaries in the theology faculty. [End Page 119]These initial interpretive decisions shape the overall structure of Grellard's book, which moves, in three parts, from a deft analysis of Nicholas's theory of evidence and probability to his account of the objects of cognition and, finally, to a comparison of Nicholas's and Buridan's epistemological theories. Unlike so many prior studies that begin with Nicholas's famous critique of a fellow theologian's cognitive theories, thereby framing Nicholas's project in terms of theological debates concerning the intuitive cognition of non-existents and God's ability to cause false visions, Grellard begins with Nicholas's positive theory of knowledge. This effectively sidesteps the entire question of Nicholas's skepticism, a question Nicholas himself explicitly tried to avoid. Nicholas comes across as a philosopher keenly aware of the limits of human cognition, yet eager to develop a viable and wholly rational epistemology within those limits. Those limits, Grellard makes clear, have everything to do with appearances, with what we can rationally and legitimately infer about the world based upon what we see... (shrink)

Dallas G. Denery - Croire et savoir: Les principes de la connaissance selon Nicolas d'Autrecourt - Journal of the History of Philosophy 44:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 44.1 119-120 Christophe Grellard. Croire et savoir: Les principes de la connaissance selon Nicolas d'Autrécourt. Paris: J. Vrin, 2005. Pp. 313. Paper, €38,00. Nicholas of Autrecourt has often seemed to be one of those philosophers doomed to be best known for everything but their own ideas. Famously, if inaccurately, (...) dubbed "the Medieval Hume" by one of his first modern critics, the threat or fear of skepticism has in one way or another shaped most subsequent studies of Nicholas's work. While understandable, this really is unfortunate. Nicholas himself clearly states that his philosophical goal was to avoid the skeptical consequences that he believed were latent in the writings of his scholastic peers. In this excellent new work, the first monograph-length study devoted to Nicholas's thought in nearly 60 years, Christophe Grellard goes a... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.2 (2004) 219-220 [Access article in PDF] Jack Zupko. John Buridan: Portrait of a Fourteenth-Century Arts Master. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2003. Pp. xix + 446. Cloth, $70.00. Paper, $40.00. What does the name "John Buridan" call to mind? For many, including medievalists, not much at all—at best, perhaps, a set of apparently unrelated ideas: nominalism; an impetus theory of (...) projectile motion; and a peculiar account of the will (although "Buridan's ass," the indecisive donkey caught between two equally appetizing bales of hay, is not found in Buridan's writing). In correcting this ignorance—an injustice to arguably the most famous and influential philosopher of the early-to-mid-fourteenth century—the temptation might have been to articulate Buridan's "positions" on "the big questions," allowing readers to fit Buridan into received categories. Thankfully, the present work, the first book-length study of Buridan in any language, resists this temptation. The John Buridan that emerges from Jack Zupko's skillful "exercise in philosophical portraiture" doesn't serve to simply fill gaps in our awareness of the historical record, but to enlighten and challenge our understanding of the practice of philosophy and the study of its history.Zupko emphasizes throughout that Buridan was a teacher, a master of arts in Paris. Buridan's pedagogical concerns help make sense of his central work in logic. As the basis for his arts lectures, Buridan chose Peter of Spain's Summulae Logicales, but in commenting on Peter, Buridan moves beyond creative exegisis to comprehensive renovation. Buridan (c. 1300-c. 1361) naturally wanted to accommodate terminist or via moderna supposition theory; but more importantly, he wanted a logic text that would set out a general plan of philosophical inquiry, "a compendium of methods, a 'how-to' book for the philosopher" (135). Buridan thus designed his own Summulae de Dialectica as a new authoritative logic text, and Zupko persuasively argues that its "nominalism" should be understood as less a set of doctrines in theoretical logic, than a program of logical practice, an education in logic as the ars artium, the universal intellectual tool.Zupko's portrait of "Buridan's vision of the philosophical enterprise" is thus appropriately divided into two parts. The first summarizes Buridan's method as described in the individual treatises of his Summulae. The second displays the method in practice, rehearsing and evaluating some of Buridan's arguments on various subjects. Many scholars will gravitate first to the latter part, where Zupko offers important interpretations and clarifications of Buridan's views. In these chapters, Zupko helps us to appreciate, among other things: how the problem of universals served to help Buridan define the scope of philosophy (ch. 10); the philosophical modesty of Buridan's account of the intellectual soul's presence in the body (ch. 11); the relationship between Buridan's epistemology and the skepticism of his Parisian contemporary Nicholas of Autrecourt (ch. 12); the sense in which Buridan is an "empiricist," viz an epistemic naturalist and reliabilist (ch. 13); how Buridan regarded moral psychology as applied physics, treating virtue as a kind of impetus (ch. 14); how Buridan's account of freedom can be regarded as a "perfection" of Thomistic intellectualism (ch. 15).Throughout these discussions, Zupko always keeps in sight his larger purpose of illustrating Buridan's conception of philosophical inquiry. Zupko makes much of the fact that [End Page 219] Buridan never wrote as a theologian, remaining his entire career in the arts faculty, where he wanted logic to organize secular inquiry. As Zupko notes, in this way Buridan's scholastic project seems to prefigure the "modern." But Buridan seems modern in another way as well. As Zupko points out in his "Introduction," though a cleric, Buridan never joined a religious order, so that his ideas developed independently of the Franciscan and Dominican traditions. He was, then, a teacher without a tradition—at least without deliberate allegiance to tradition, although he was in many ways the product of traditional scholastic intellectual discipline.Perhaps this... (shrink)

Here, I combine the semantics of Mares and Goldblatt [20] and Seki [29, 30] to develop a semantics for quantified modal relevant logics extending ${\bf B}$. The combination requires demonstrating that the Mares–Goldblatt approach is apt for quantified extensions of ${\bf B}$ and other relevant logics, but no significant bridging principles are needed. The result is a single semantic approach for quantified modal relevant logics. Within this framework, I discuss the requirements a quantified modal relevant logic must satisfy to be (...) “sufficiently classical” in its modal fragment, where frame conditions are given that work for positive fragments of logics. The roles of the Barcan formula and its converse are also investigated. (shrink)

Recent attempts to distinguish a normatively acceptable “civic nationalism"—as distinct from an irrationally tainted “ethnic nationalism"—have failed to take seriously the implications of the transition from the city as the immediate spatial unit of the patria to the more abstract national state that replaced it. The nation‐state has required a mythologizing naturalism to legitimate it, thus blurring the distinction between “civic” and “ethnic.” The urban political experience of the patria is lost to us; cosmopolitan intellectuals should resist the comforting temptation (...) to recover it in the nation, and should recognize civic nationalism for the oxymoron it is. (shrink)

This book explores and articulates the concepts of the continuous and the infinitesimal from two points of view: the philosophical and the mathematical. The first section covers the history of these ideas in philosophy. Chapter one, entitled ‘The continuous and the discrete in Ancient Greece, the Orient and the European Middle Ages,’ reviews the work of Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, and other Ancient Greeks; the elements of early Chinese, Indian and Islamic thought; and early Europeans including Henry of Harclay, Nicholas (...) of Autrecourt, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, Thomas Bradwardine and Nicolas Oreme. The second chapter of the book covers European thinkers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries: Galileo, Newton, Leibniz, Descartes, Arnauld, Fermat, and more. Chapter three, 'The age of continuity,’ discusses eighteenth century mathematicians including Euler and Carnot, and philosophers, among them Hume, Kant and Hegel. Examining the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the fourth chapter describes the reduction of the continuous to the discrete, citing the contributions of Bolzano, Cauchy and Reimann. Part one of the book concludes with a chapter on divergent conceptions of the continuum, with the work of nineteenth and early twentieth century philosophers and mathematicians, including Veronese, Poincaré, Brouwer, and Weyl. Part two of this book covers contemporary mathematics, discussing topology and manifolds, categories, and functors, Grothendieck topologies, sheaves, and elementary topoi. Among the theories presented in detail are non-standard analysis, constructive and intuitionist analysis, and smooth infinitesimal analysis/synthetic differential geometry. No other book so thoroughly covers the history and development of the concepts of the continuous and the infinitesimal. (shrink)

Philosophers and economists write about collective action from distinct but related points of view. This paper aims to bridge these perspectives. Economists have been concerned with rationality in a strategic context. There, problems posed by “coordination games” seem to point to a form of rational action, “team thinking,” which is not individualistic. Philosophers’ analyses of collective intention, however, sometimes reduce collective action to a set of individually instrumental actions. They do not, therefore, capture the first person plural perspective characteristic of (...) team thinking. Other analyses, problematically, depict intentions ranging over others’ actions. I offer an analysis of collective intention which avoids these problems. A collective intention aims only at causing an individual action, but its propositional content stipulates its mirroring in other minds. (shrink)

The French feminist philosopher Michèle Le Doeuff has taught us something about “the collectivity,” which she discovers in women’s struggle for access to the philosophical, but also about “the unknown” and “the unthought.” It is the unthought which will matter most to what I intend to say today about a fundamental ignorance on which speaker vulnerability is built. On International Women’s Day, it seems appropriate to speak about – or, at least, to evoke – the silencing which has been imposed (...) on women by an oppressive form of ignorance. My question is: how do our resounding voices as women – on 8 March 2016 – avoid what feminist philosophers have distinguished as wilful forms of silencing? Silencing exploits vulnerability; and speaker vulnerability is an exposure either to violence or affection, in its dependence on an audience. My response seeks to undo the silencing of women by transforming an ignorance of vulnerability into a distinctively ethical avowal. To see the significance of this undoing, we will consider how our contemporary global world reduces vulnerability to an openness to violence, ignoring what has been unthought: an openness to affection. A wilful ignorance of vulnerability develops not as a lack of knowledge but its disavowal – on which various forms of oppression are built. An active disavowal of thinking (the unthought) is the other side of a striving for invulnerability; and this striving is encouraged by a social world which remains ignorant of its own wounding, as well as its own potential for ethical relations in vulnerability. Like la mauvaise foi of the French existentialist, invulnerability is a form of self-deception; and those who claim it embrace ignorance of their own and others’ vulnerability too. (shrink)

In this essay Nicholas C. Burbules reviews his experiences and the lessons he learned as editor of Educational Theory for more than twenty years, and he explores some of the normative choices that are inevitably made by any editor in carrying out his or her role. Burbules examines the relationship of a journal to its intellectual field; the review process; communications and interactions with authors; the process of editing and revising manuscripts; questions of representativeness in a theoretically pluralistic field; (...) the business of journal publishing; and the dilemmas that confront an editor in terms of his or her own position and identity within a field. In all of these reflections, he examines the ethical and political background of the choices made, and how these in turn reveal deeper assumptions about the nature and purpose of academic publishing. The result is to “lift up the curtain” and reveal how one philosophically reflective and self-questioning editor handled his responsibilities. (shrink)

In my response to Kevin Carnahan, I explain the concept of religion that I have been working with in my writings on the place of religious reasons in public political discourse. While acknowledging that religion is often privatized, my concern has been with religion as a way of life. It is religion so understood that raises the most serious issues concerning the role of religion in public discourse. In my response to Erik A. Anderson, I go beyond what I have (...) previously said about the role of religious reasons in public discourse. As an alternative to Rawlsian public reason, I argue that the essence of liberal democracy is that every citizen is to have equal political voice. I go on to consider what it is to exercise one’s equal political voice as a moral engagement. (shrink)

This article is a response to the commentaries on my book Justice: Rights and Wrongs in the previous contributions in this issue of Studies in Christian Ethics (23.2).

The main characteristic of modern science is that its new theories contain the old ones as their particular cases. In this respect, one can speak of "modern" science only since 17th century discoveries of Galileo, Kepler and Descartes. Yet, one can find certain traits of the modern scientific mode of thinking as early as in 14th century; they include interest in the practical use of science, introduction of experiment and mathematical method. Late medieval science was powerfully influenced by the doctrines (...) of Aristotle, who found the essence of scientific pursuit in establishing the causes of the phenomena observed in the world in the inductive process of abstraction, which has three main stages of generalization: physics, mathematics, and metaphysics. In physics the solutions were hinged on the concept of natural directions and the belief that uniform motion requires permanent application of power. The foundations of Aristotelean physics were first questioned in the 14th century. Duns Scotus and Wiliam of Ockham critically discussed the doctrine of induction, originating the shift of interest towards observation. Peter of Abano started the theory of experiment. Some criticism came from the theologians, who questioned certain limitations of the Aristotelean frame of mind. The main subject of controversy was the concept of vacuum, discussed especially with the reference to motion. Here the Aristotelean standpoint was criticised from the positions of atomism and Platonism by a number of scholars starting from Robert Grosseteste, through Giles of Rome and Nicholas of Autrecourt, to Nicholas of Cusa and Giordano Bruno. Other controversial problems included plurality of the worlds, privileged positions in the universe, circular motion of the earth. Here an important contribution was made by Nicolas Copernicus. Another group of scholars, which helped to overcome Aristoteleanism, was the so-called Merton school of Oxford. Their new theories of motion, which distinguished between its kinematic and dynamic aspects, quickly spread through Europe and are said to have influenced Galileo. Yet another source of inspiration was found by Galileo in the views of the nominalist school of Paris, notably Nicholas of Oresme and John Buridan. By reaping the benefit of their innovations and overcoming their deficiencies Galileo was able to lay foundations for the modern science, first fully formulated by Newton. (shrink)

In a matter of mere milliseconds, conversational partners can transform their expectations about the world in a way that accords with another person's perspective. At the same time, in similar situations, the exact opposite also appears to be true. Rather than being at odds, these findings suggest that there are multiple contextual and processing constraints that may guide when and how people consider perspective. These constraints are shaped by a host of factors, including the availability of social and environmental cues, (...) and intrinsic biases and cognitive abilities. To explain how these might be integrated in a new way forward, we turn to an adaptive account of interpersonal interaction. This account draws from basic principles of dynamical systems, principles that we argue are already expressed, both implicitly and explicitly, within a broad landscape of existing research. We then showcase an initial attempt to develop a computational framework to instantiate some of these principles. This framework, consisting of what we argue to be important mechanistic insights rendered by neural network models, is based on a promising and long-standing approach that has yet to take hold in the current domain. We argue that by bridging this gap, new insights into other theoretical accounts, such as the connections between memory and common ground information, might be revealed. (shrink)