Over the thirty years since his death Martin Heidegger hasemerged as one of the key philosophers of the 20th Century. Yet he claimed to be moved throughout the entirety of his work by a single question: the question of the meaning of being. According to Heidegger the ancient Greek thinkers experienced being with a sense of wonder that has been lost in modernity. There has never been a satisfactory answer to this question and philosophers are no longer even perplexed by (...) their inability to answer it. It was the question of being that Heidegger set out to confront in his unfinished master work Being and Time. The young Heidegger years before the publication of that work had been afforded an insight to an aspect of what would become his central concern from what at first might seem an unlikely source: the medieval philosopher and theologian John Duns Scotus.Scotus inspired Heidegger in so far as his thought was in proximity to “real life,” and while he would later move decisively away from the position he took in his ‘scotus Book,” in a move that has been referred to as the first “turn” in his thought from the ‘system of Catholicism” to liberal Protestantism, Scotus provided the young scholar with an insight into human individuality that would prove decisive in his mature work. Despite this move away from any kind of “onto-logic,” there is an element of Heidegger’s thought that is influenced by Scotus, one of the brightest stars of medieval philosophy. So, while my investigation is conducted with the fact of this turn in mind, my aim is to explore this element. (shrink)

The authors of the article aim to show the ideological and historical origins of the idea of a social contract, as well as the fundamental difference between the modern version of the social contract and its historical predecessors. By distinguishing between the synodal and contractual principles of integration, the authors conclude that the social contract is not a purely modern political idea. The contractual principle as the basis of the organization and legitimization of power was systematically developed already in the (...) XIII-XIV centuries, taking the form of a socio-political program in the theory of the cathedral governance of the church. In contrast to medieval concepts, the modern social contract is not a consequence of God's established order, but the will of human individuals. Due to this determination of will, individuals limit their natural freedom for the sake of the possibility and good of common existence. (shrink)

In this article, the author studies some central concepts in Avicenna's and sī's modal logics as presented in Avicenna's Al-Ish r t wa'l Tan īh t ( Pointers and Reminders ) and in sī's commentary. In this work, Avicenna introduces some remarkable distinctions in order to interpret Aristotle's modal syllogistic in the Prior Analytics . The author outlines a new interpretation of absolute sentences as temporally indefinite sentences and argues on the basis of this that Avicenna seems to subscribe to (...) the Principle of Plenitude. He also shows that he has no valid proof of the modal conversion rules and that he uses some rather ad hoc distinctions to show that Aristotle's modal syllogistic is correct. The author also notes some interesting differences between Avicenna's and sī's approaches to modal logic. (shrink)

With the aid of some Scotistic conceptual distinctions, I develop a way of meeting the apparent deterministic sway of neurobiology. I make a careful distinction between formal and material freedom. Formal freedom, the ability to will or not to will a certain state of affairs regardless of whether it can be effectuated, remains, even if our material freedom to effectuate it is hampered by neurobiological mechanisms. These conceptual findings are linked with contemporary empirical research on obsessive-compulsive disorder and the possibility (...) of volitional modulation of cerebral function. (shrink)

یکی از مهم‌ترین ویژگی‌های علم نوین روش کمّی و ریاضیاتی آن است. باور رایج این است که این مبنای علم نوین در قرن شانزدهم و در انقلاب علمی به همراه خود علم نوین به وجود آمده است، لکن بررسی‌های تاریخی حاکی از آن است که روش کمّی علم نه در بحبوحه ظهور علم نوین در انقلاب علمی، بلکه در منازعات الهیاتی قرون وسطای متأخر متولد شد. این نکته از جهت روشن کردن رابطه‌ای که علم و دین در طول تاریخ مغرب‌زمین (...) داشته‌اند حائز اهمیت است. شواهدی حاکی از آن است که متألهان مسیحی، با انگیزه‌های الهیاتی، مسائلی را مطرح کردند که بستر مناسبی را برای پیدایش تجربه‌گرایی به وجود آورد. در نوشتار حاضر عوامل پیدایش روش کمّی را در قرون وسطای متأخر و در میان متألهان مسیحی مورد بررسی قرار خواهیم داد. از خلال این بررسی آشکار خواهد شد که در این عصر سه عامل مهم که با انگیزه‌های الهیاتی همراه بودند در به وجود آمدن روش کمّی موثر واقع شدند: توجه به نورشناسی با انگیزه‌های الهیاتی، افلاطون‌گرایی در الهیات، و وجود انگیزۀ الهیاتی در استفاده از ریاضیات. در ضمنِ این تحلیل، رابطۀ تجربه‌گرایی و الهیات مسیحی در قرون وسطای متأخر روشن خواهد شد. (shrink)

This article investigates the palimpsest reception of Pseudo-Dionysius (ca. 500) in the metaphysics of Nicholas of Cusa (1401–1464). The article covers Cusa’s political theory and metaphysics, which are intertwined. Reading Cusa against the backdrop of an analysis of Pseudo-Dionysius’ metaphysics in a preceding article, the author, in a synthetic conclusion, isolates seven Dionysic ‘trails’ (S1 to S7) in Cusa’s metaphysics: the interpretation of transcendence as bound to immanence; the affirmation of God’s transcendence in the world (or a metaphysics of ‘creation (...) as teophany’); the radical transcendence and simultaneous radical immanence of God (that is, God as ‘Beingness’); fundamental restrictions of language and the analogical ‘Naming’ of God; creation as a system of dialectical symbols about God; the analogical participation of the subject in creation; and unification (reditus, the ‘flowing of things back to God’). The Dionysic trails in Cusa’s metaphysics are described as a noteworthy, if not important, palimpsest in the corpus of late Medieval philosophy and is indicative of what the author puts forward as ‘discursive memory’, which is presented as a modern-critical concept. (shrink)

Phenomenologists have no taste for desert landscapes. The early phenomenologists—Edmund Husserl, Max Scheler, and Roman Ingarden—adopt stratified views of reality on which spiritual objects like artifacts and persons are distinct from their underlying matter. Call this view “pluralism.” After describing Scheler, Ingarden, and Husserl's pluralism about goods, literary artworks, and images, respectively, I reconstruct a phenomenological case for pluralism from Husserl's work and defend it against an objection. The phenomenological method reveals a special subset of objects' essential properties: modes of (...) givenness. On Husserl's view, there are necessary correlations between types of objects and the types of intentional acts through which they are given. Spiritual objects, unlike their matter, can only be given in acts belonging to the “personalistic attitude,” which has a motivational and expressive structure. My broader claim is that Husserl's phenomenology is a sophisticated metametaphysical view about the methodology of first‐order metaphysical inquiry. (shrink)