Throughout their life Ibn Sînâ and Descartes firmly believed that the soul or mind of a human being was essentially incorporeal. In his ‘On the Soul’ (De anima), the psychological part of his vast...

The position on the question of divine providence of the Aristotelian commentator Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c. A.D. 200) is of particular interest. It marks an attempt to find avia mediabetween the Epicurean denial of any divine concern for the world, on the one hand, and the Stoic view that divine providence governs it in every detail, on the other.2As an expression of such a middle course it finds a place in later classifications of views concerning providence.3It is also of (...) topical interest: Alexander's fullest discussion, in his treatiseDe providentia (On Providence)(surviving only in two Arabic versions), has only recently been edited and translated,4although some aspects of his position had long been known from other texts preserved in Greek.5. (shrink)

This paper examines al-Fārābī's logical thought within its Arabico-Islamic historical background and attempts to conceptualize what this background contributes to his logic. After a brief exposition of al-Fārābī's main problems and goals, I shall attempt to reformulate the formal structure of Arabic linguistics (AL) in terms of the ontological and formal characteristics that Arabic logic is built upon. Having discussed the competence of al-Fārābī in the history of AL, I will further propose three interrelated theses about al-Fārābī's logic, in terms (...) of which I will attempt to redefine it: the logico-linguistic conception, the project of logicization, and nuclear logic. The final question that will arise is how Aristotle's logic could be built upon AL, which has a nature contrary to logic. The present paper also contributes to examining our traditional research habits in Arabic studies. (shrink)

The Hebrew text On the Heavens and the World, ascribed to Ibn S, is an interesting and intriguing composition. It dates from the 13th century and was quite influential. It is not a translation of any text of Ibn S known to us, but is related to the Latin De celo et mundo, which appears in the 1508 Venice edition of translations of Ibn S. The Latin and Hebrew texts differ widely and the relation between them is far from being (...) clear. Both are in sixteen chapters, the titles of the chapters are the same, but the texts are only roughly similar. The Hebrew text often offers short, incomplete summaries of the Latin arguments. On the other hand it includes many passages which have no parallel in the Latin. There are two possible explanations of the perplexing relationship between the two texts: either that there was more than one version of the Latin text, or that the translator, Shlomo ben Moshe of Laguiri wrote a kind of paraphrase. The paper shows that the second explanation is correct and offers a preliminary study of the sources and the aims of the Hebrew text. (shrink)

Intentionality (‘directedness’, ‘aboutness’) is both a central topic in contemporary philosophy of mind, phenomenology and the cognitive sciences, and one of the themes with which both analytic and Continental philosophers have separately engaged starting from Brentano and Edmund Husserl’s ground-breaking Logical Investigations (1901) through Roderick M. Chisholm, Daniel C. Dennett’s The Intentional Stance, John Searle’s Intentionality, to the recent work of Tim Crane, Robert Brandom, Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi, among many others. In this paper, I shall review recent discussions (...) of intentionality, including some recent explorations of the history of the concept (paying particular attention to Anselm), and suggest some ways the phenomenological approach of Husserl and Heidegger can still offer insights for contemporary philosophy of mind and consciousness. (shrink)

En este trabajo se estudia la determinación escotista del objeto de la lógica, en tanto ciencia intencional común. La reflexión se concentra en la tercera de las Cuestiones a la Isagoge de Porfirio, donde Escoto presenta y evalúa varios candidatos al rol de objeto de la lógica. Teniendo como parámetro de evaluación un conjunto de condiciones a cumplir por el objeto de una ciencia, Escoto concluye que el objeto de la lógica es el silogismo. Sobre ese resultado, el artículo defiende (...) la tesis de que, junto a dicho objeto, entendido como objeto propio, se puede inferir la presencia de un objeto común: las segundas intenciones. En cuanto al silogismo como objeto, se sostiene que este da unidad a la lógica por atribución y no por predicación. (shrink)

Le texte hébraïqueDu ciel et du mondeattribué à Ibn Sīnā. est une œuvre intéressante et intriguante. Il date du XIIIesiècle et a exercé une influence considérable. Le texte hébraïque n'est la traduction d'aucun texte connu d'Ibn Sīnā; il s'apparente en revanche au texte latin (pseudo-avicennien)De celo et mundo, figurant dans l'édition de Venise de 1508 des traductions latines d'Ibn Sīnā. Les textes latin et hébraïque présentent cependant de très nombreuses différences et le rapport entre eux est loin d'être évident. Bien (...) que tous deux comportent seize chapitres dont les titres sont identiques, le contenu des deux textes n'est que très grossièrement similaire: d'un côté, le texte hébraïque donne souvent de brefs résumés des arguments contenus dans le texte latin; de l'autre, il comporte de nombreux passages qui n'ont pas de parallèles dans le texte latin. Deux explications peuvent rendre compte du rapport entre les deux textes: soit il y avait une autre version latine du texte (ou de l'original arabe), soit le traducteur du texte hébreu, Shlomo ben Moshe de Laguiri, avait en fait rédigé une paraphrase, comportant des suppressions et des additions, du texte latin. Cet article montre que c'est la deuxieme hypothèse qui est la vraie. Il offre en outre une étude préliminaire des sources et des buts du texte hébreu. (shrink)