Autor ukazuje na temeljne ideje i teme po kojima će Tomina misao ostati prepoznatljiva u povijesti filozofije: princip aktualizacije, bivstvovanje kao „aktualnost svih akata i savršenost svih savršenstava”, princip individuacije, jedinstvo supstancijalne forme, vrste apstrakcije, odbacivanje univerzalnog hilemorfizma, realna kompozicija (stvarna razlika), „ipsum esse subsistens, esse commune”, umska bića, dokaz za postojanje Boga, itd. … Objavom ove knjige ovo će jezično područje biti iznimno obogaćeno uvidom u relevantnu filozofijsku tematiku u odnosu na pitanje tumačenja Tomina djela, a koje je od (...) posebnog značenja za studente filozofije, kojima se želi ponuditi temeljiti uvod u filozofiju. (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)

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...

"This book does nothing less than to set new standards in combining philosophical with political theology.

Aquinas’ famous comments in his early Scriptum on the Sentences (In I Sent., d. 38, q. 1, a. 3) regarding the intellect’s apprehension of essence and esse have traditionally been interpreted as grounding Aquinas’ doctrine on the judgment of esse. For Aquinas, it appears, what the intellect apprehends in a simple concept is essence. Since esse, for him, is not an essence, it cannot, on the received view, be the object of conceptualization. Therefore, esse is grasped by the intellect only (...) in judgment. The claim that no genuine concept of esse is possible, however, is inconsistent with Aquinas’ theory of signification. A term’s signification is constituted, at least in part, in its “signing relation” with some “concept” in the mind. If, as on the traditional reading, there is no concept of esse, the term ‘esse’ is left without signification. To respond that the term ‘esse’ signs, not a concept, but the judgment in which esse is apprehended is in direct conflict with Aquinas’ claim elsewhere that no term, including ‘ens’ and ‘esse’, signifies a judgment. I propose an alternative interpretation to In I Sent., d. 38, q. 1, a. 3, one that allows for the possibility of a conceptual apprehension of esse. The alternative reading explains Aquinas’ remarks there in light of the theoretical context of the discussion, in particular the theory of propositions and their objects. I show how and why Aquinas develops a distinctive theory of the object of the proposition, that it is concerned with “the esse of a thing” as a complex. Although this complex includes the simple act of being, as for the traditional position (contrary to its major critics), it cannot be reduced to anything simple. Despite the Sentences’ affirmation of a real distinction between a thing’s esse and essence, to which correspond two different operations of the intellect, it does not follow that the human intellect cannot conceive esse, just as it conceives essences, in a simple conception. (shrink)

Although he does not have an explicit theory of supposition as is found in the works of Latin medieval philosophers, Avicenna has two doctrines giving something equivalent: the threefold distinction of quiddity, corresponding to a division of simple, personal and material supposition, and his analyses of truth conditions for categorical propositions, where sentential context determines in part the reference of their terms. While he does address which individuals are being referred to by the universal terms used there, Avicenna concentrates more (...) on the varied temporal durations of the predications being made. In Western terms, he has incorporated ampliation and restriction into the theory of supposition itself. (shrink)