Increasing attention has been paid to Platonism in Rousseau’s moral and political thought; however, there has been incomplete consideration of his annotated Platonis Operum – a Ficino Latin translation. Addressing this lacuna, the article details Rousseau’s study of Plato’s works. It can be shown that Rousseau’s reading of Plato commenced no earlier than the summer of 1737 during his residence at Les Charmettes. At this time, Rousseau had been considering a set of largely seventeenth-century philosophical texts, which allows contextualisation of (...) his encounter with Plato and the themes he drew upon. As part of a cluster of intellectual activities, Rousseau canvassed Platonic tropes of sublimated Eros and disinterestedness. Meanwhile, he conceptualised ideas as objects of the understanding typical of Locke and a seventeenth-century discourse known as the ‘way of ideas’. These interests challenge existing accounts of Rousseau’s Platonism; moreover, Rousseau’s mature works attempt to reconcile Platonic beliefs on sublime love with ideas conceptualised under a demi-Lockean episteme. (shrink)

A historical and philosophical reassessment of the impact of Aristotle and early-modern Aristotelianism on the development of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Kant and Aristotle reassesses the prevailing understanding of Kant as an anti-Aristotelian philosopher. Taking epistemology, logic, and methodology to be the key disciplines through which Kant’s transcendental philosophy stood as an independent form of philosophy, Marco Sgarbi shows that Kant drew important elements of his logic and metaphysical doctrines from Aristotelian ideas that were absent in other philosophical traditions, such as (...) the distinction of matter and form of knowledge, the division of transcendental logic into analytic and dialectic, the theory of categories and schema, and the methodological issues of the architectonic. Drawing from unpublished documents including lectures, catalogues, academic programs, and the Aristotelian-Scholastic handbooks that were officially adopted at Königsberg University where Kant taught, Sgarbi further demonstrates the historical and philosophical importance of Aristotle and Aristotelianism to these disciplines from the late sixteenth century to the first half of the eighteenth century. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to assess the central role the imagination acquires in Pierre Gassendi’s logic. I trace the structuring scheme of the three acts of the mind—common to a good number of late scholastic and early modern logics—to the Thomistic notion of the movement of reasoning in knowledge and argue that Gassendi revisits this notion in his logic. The three acts scheme is from the beginning a bridge between logic and the natural philosophical treatment of the soul. (...) I show how Gassendi’s take on the three acts is similarly poised between his Logic and his Physics and I discuss the rationale, sources and consequences of his attribution of the three acts to the imagination. I argue for the following points: Gassendi’s conception of the logical role of the imagination answers to his empiricist epistemology, his naturalized view of the mind and his notion of a natural logic; it is also operative in his pairing of the formal mechanism of logical operations with a progressive mechanism of the operations of the mind; and it serves as a counterpart to his experimental understanding of the progress of knowledge.1. (shrink)

Being mainly concerned with the origins and development of formal logic, current “histories of logic” often devote scarce, if any, space to logic in the early modern period. In standard narratives, emphasis is put, on one side, on Aristotle’s Organon and on the Stoics’ logic of propositions, and on the other side, on the development of mathematical logic from Boole and Frege on. The picture often emerging from such reconstructions represents early modern philosophers—net of their criticisms of Aristotelian syllogism— as (...) largely estranged from the discipline. It is true that, the medieval period’s concern with semantic and inference issues has been accounted... (shrink)