According to Marin Cureau de La Chambre—steering a middleway between the Aristotelian and the Cartesian conception of the soul—everything that lives cognizes and everything that cognizes is alive. Cureau sticks with the general tripart distinction of vegetative, sensitive, and intellectual soul. Each part of the soul has its own cognition. Cognition is the way in which living beings regulate bodily equilibirum and environmental navigation. This regulative activity is gouverned by acquired or by innate images. Natural cognition (or instinct) is cognition (...) by innate images only. Cureau develops a highly originel theory of natural (or 'specialized') instinct. His theory attempts to explain five features of instinct (innateness, specialization, species-specifitiy, coerciveness, teleological nature). According to my interpretation, Cureau proposes a species of what is called a 'teleosemantic theory' of innate cognition. (shrink)

In 1575, the Spanish physician Juan Huarte records his encounter with a ‘rude countrie fellow’ who made ‘very eloquent discourse’ after becoming frantic.1 Other brief historiae follow: another ‘fra...

My goal in this paper is to contribute to the literature on Roger Bacon's epistemology by focusing on the issue of perception of quantity. The reading I aim to substantiate is that Bacon's account is best understood in terms of indirect realism. I call it indirect realism because although we have access to quantities as they exist in nature, the account is mediated by the use of a quasi-syllogism. The quasi-syllogism is constructed based on three inputs, the species of the (...) eye, colour, and light. To defend this reading I follow five steps. First, I analyse the importance of quantity in perception, and then, in steps two and three, I look at Bacon's theory of perception from its two sides, extramission and intromission. In the fourth step I look at the quasi-syllogisms that mediate cognition of quantities, and in the fifth and final step, I draw all the threads together and make the case for Bacon's indirect realism of quantity perception. (shrink)