"Gill's and Ryan's Parmenides is, simply, superb: the Introduction, more than a hundred pages long, is transparently clear, takes the reader meticulously through the arguments, avoids perverseness, and still manages to make sense of the dialogue as a whole; there is a fine selective bibliography; and those parts of the translation I have looked at in detail suggest that it too is very good indeed." --Christopher Rowe, _Phronesis_.

In an earlier work, I proposed understanding Aquinas’s theory of cognition in terms of the possession of information about the world. This proposal has seemed problematic in various ways. It has been said to include too much, and too little, and to be the wrong sort of account altogether. Nevertheless, I continue to think of it as the most plausible interpretation of Aquinas’s theory.

One of the chief innovations in medieval adaptations of Aristotelian psychology was the expansion of Aristotle's notion of imagination orphantasiato include a variety of distinct perceptual powers known collectively as the internal senses. Amongst medieval philosophers in the Arabic world, Avicenna offers one of the most complex and sophisticated accounts of the internal senses. Within his list of internal senses, Avicenna includes a faculty known as “estimation”, to which various functions are assigned in a wide variety of contexts. Although many (...) philosophers in the Arabic world as well as in the Latin West accepted Avicenna's positing of an estimative faculty, Avicenna's best-known critics, al-Ghazâlî and Averroes, found Avicenna's arguments in support of a distinct estimative faculty problematic. For different reasons, both Averroes and Ghazâlî raised the basic question of whether one needed to posit a distinct faculty of estimation to supplement the perceptual abilities of the other internal senses, and whether the notion of an estimative power as defined by Avicenna was internally coherent. Such criticisms suggest that the Avicennian conception of estimation is not entirely unambiguous, and that a correct understanding of Avicenna's motivations for delineating an estimative power requires a careful study of the diverse activities assigned to it throughout Avicenna's philosophical writings. (shrink)

This book is a major contribution to the history of philosophy in the later medieval period (1250-1350). It focuses on cognitive theory, a subject of intense investigation during these years. In fact many of the issues that dominate philosophy of mind and epistemology today - intentionality, mental representation, scepticism, realism - were hotly debated in the later medieval period. The book offers a careful analysis of these debates, primarily through the work of Thomas Aquinas, John Olivi, and William Ockham. Each (...) of these figures attempts to reconceptualise cognition along direct realist lines, criticising in the process the standard Aristotelian account. Though of primary interest to medieval philosophers, the book presupposes no background knowledge of the medieval period, and will therefore interest a broader community of philosophers concerned with the origins of contemporary cognitive theory. (shrink)

Avicenna's discussion of space is found in his comments on Aristotle's account of place. Aristotle identified four candidates for place: a body's matter, form, the occupied space, or the limits of the containing body, and opted for the last. Neoplatonic commentators argued contra Aristotle that a thing's place is the space it occupied. Space for these Neoplatonists is something possessing dimensions and distinct from any body that occupies it, even if never devoid of body. Avicenna argues that this Neoplatonic notion (...) of space is untenable on the basis of three arguments. In general he maintains that bodies' impenetrability is explained by reference to dimensionality. Consequently, if it is dimensionality that explains impenetrability, and yet as the Neoplatonists hold space inherently possesses dimensions, material bodies could never interpenetrate space and so occupy it and thus bodies could never have a place. The conclusion is patently false. In additions Avicenna argues that the method used to arrive at the possibility of space is illicit, and so Neoplatonist cannot show that space is even possible. Thus, concludes Avicenna, Aristotle's initial account must be correct. The paper outlines the historical context of this debate and then treats Avicenna's arguments against space in detail. (shrink)

Is Aquinas a representationalist or a direct realist? Max Herrera’s (and, for that matter, Claude Panaccio’s) qualified answers to each alternative show that the real significance of the question is not that if we answer it, then we can finally learn under which classification Aquinas should fall, but rather that upon considering it we can learn something about the intricacies of the question itself. In these comments I will first argue that the Averroistic notion of “intentional transfer”, combined with the (...) Avicennean idea of the indifference of nature, yielding the Thomistic doctrine of the formal unity of the knower and the known renders the question moot with regard to Aquinas, indeed, with regard to the pre-modern epistemological tradition in general. These considerations will then lead to a number of further, both historical and philosophical questions, which I will offer in the end for further discussion. (shrink)