Philosophy and Theology in the Long Middle Ages

Logic and Intentionality According to Hervaeus Natalis, 2017

This is the text of my doctoral dissertation, which I do not plan to publish officially. While I would rewrite various aspects of it, I thought it to be worthwhile to post it online in case there were others who might be interested. My thought on these matters has been developed (and, in some ways superseded) by two articles in the ACPQ: "Beyond Non-Being: omistic Metaphysics on Second Intentions, Ens morale, and Ens articiale" (Summer 2017) and "Thomism and the Formal Object of Logic" (Summer 2019). However, I see no reason to revisit this in a book-length project along the lines of the dissertation itself. As anyone who has written a dissertation knows, such work is subject to many limitations—not the least of which is the desire merely to have the dissertation completed and endlessly be in graduate school! The official abstract for the works is as follows: Hervaeus Natalis’s De secundis intentionibus represents the crystalization of an important philosophical tradition concerning the nature of logic. As the 14th century opened, thinkers focused on the nature of logic vis-à-vis the inherited Aristotelian schema of sciences and ontology. Hervaeus’s treatise considers in detail the metaphysical claims necessary for maintaining that second intentions—i.e. notions such as genus, species, enunciation, syllogism, and others—are relationes rationis that are a kind of “non-being” in comparison with the ten categories. The De secundis intentionibus shows itself to be a generally conservative attempt to explain the nature of logic from a broadly Peripatetic perspective. This dissertation articulates this interpretation of the treatise. The first chapter frames the De secundis intentionibus from the perspective of Aristotle’s remarks in the Metaphysics regarding “being as the true and the false” and Avicenna’s brief remarks regarding second intentions at the beginning of his Liber de prima philosophia. Then, two emblematic 13th century figures are considered, namely Robert Kilwardby and Thomas Aquinas. The second chapter focuses on the advances and ambiguities found in the thought of John Duns Scotus, who is presented as an important proximate source for Hervaeus’s treatise. The chapter emphasizes Scotus’s use of the distinction between subjective and objective existence in explaining his views concerning logic and second intentions. This distinction is important for Hervaeus, and its likely Scotistic provenance is not given adequate attention in the scholarly literature. The chapter also discusses the ambiguities found in Scotus’s remarks regarding the relationship between the various acts of intellection and the formation of second intentions. It advocates a broader interpretation of Scotus’s position than is sometimes advanced in the scholarly literature on this topic. The third chapter presents the overall view of Hervaeus’s intentionality doctrine. The doctrine is presented as being part of medieval discussions concerning Aristotle’s “being as the true and the false.” This dissertation challenges the reigning hermeneutic applied to the treatise, a hermeneutic that tends to emphasize questions pertaining to cognition and “realism.” This chapter explains Hervaeus’s position that second intentions are relationes rationis formed by all three acts of the intellect. It focuses on the fact that for Hervaeus “intentionality” indicates a non-real relation from the known thing to the knower. The consequences of this view are discussed at length. The fourth chapter considers the final question of the De secundis intentionibus in detail. It explains Hervaeus’s defense of the possibility of a science of second intentional being. The chapter also discusses Hervaeus’s distinction between second intentions and other kinds of entia rationis, emphasizing how the treatise greatly expands the inherited Peripatetic domain of “being as the true and the false.” The chapter closes by defending the claim that the De secundis intentionibus is primarily a work of metaphysics, not logic or epistemology. By reading the De secundis intentionibus in light of the broader medieval question concerning the nature of logic and the Aristotelian division of “being as the true and the false,” it is clear that Hervaeus’s treatise aims to present the philosophical distinctions necessary for delineating a robust, broadly Peripatetic metaphysics of logic.

RESUMEN El presente trabajo estudia dos aspectos del prólogo de Juan Duns Escoto a sus Cuestiones a la Metafísica de Aristóteles. El argumento a priori para demostrar la nobleza y dignidad de la metafísica y el tratamiento de la pregunta por el objeto científico de la metafísica y por su articulación con las otras realidades tratadas por esta ciencia. Veremos cómo el prólogo de Escoto se inscribe en una tradición interpretativa cuyos dos interlocutores principales son Tomás de Aquino y Avicena. ABSTRACT This paper studies two aspects of John Duns Scotus's Prologue to his Questions on the Metaphysics of Aristotle. The a priori argument to prove the nobility and dignity of metaphysics and the treatment of the question about the scientific object of metaphysics and its articulation with the other realities treated in this science. The paper also shows how Scotus's prologue follows an interpretative tradition whose principal interlocutors are Thomas Aquinas and Avicenna.

in "Medioevo", 34 (2009), pp. 9-59., 2009

The essay traces the history of the debate on the nature of metaphysics and its object from Late Antiquity to the 14th century in the frame of the history of the debate on the nature of the subject/object of science. As a consequence it identifies five elements constituting the question of the nature of metaphysics: the epistemological role of the subject/object of science; the degree of insight of metaphysics into that which it considers; the role assigned to God and separate substances within metaphysics; the relationship between metaphysics, or rational theology, and revealed theology; and the different conceptions that authors develop of the notion of being. The positions of a number of authors from Antiquity to the Later Middle Ages concerning this themes are examined here and their historical relationships investigated. As for Thomas Aquinas, for instance, I argue that he does not consider the ens commune, which is the subject of metaphysics, as conceptually identical with transcendental being. For him, transcendental being includes all its inferiors; by contrast, common being includes some inferiors of being (general rationes; rationes of immaterial substances as far as the latter are taken as principles of being), but not all of them (particular rationes of material beings; rationes of immaterial substances different from those which characterize these substances when the latter are taken as principles of being). Thus, in Aquinas’s view, transcendental being is an ontological/metaphysical notion; common being is an epistemological notion. In reality they are identical, but before the mind they are not completely identical. Furthermore, one can notice that the Italian Dominican maintains that God is both cause of the subject of metaphysics and part of it. Ens commune, taken as it is in reality, is identical with transcendental being; hence, on the one hand, it is common both to material substances and to spiritual substances and, on the other, it is in a way posterior to the latter substances, since it depends upon them.

2022

The 10th edition of the Scotus bibliography, with 4500 entries.

2021

“The Division of Metaphysical Discourses: Boethius, Thomas Aquinas and Meister Eckhart”, in Philosophy and Theology in the Long Middle Ages, STGM, 105 (Leiden - Boston, 2011) (co-edited with R. Friedman & K. Emery, Jr.) , pp. 91-116.

Masters thesis

The British Journal for the History of Science, 1985

Historians of fourteenth-century science have long recognized the extraordinary work at both Oxford and Paris in which natural philosophy was becoming highly mathematical. The movement to subject natural philosophy to a mathematical analysis and to quantify such qualities as heat, color, and of course speed surely stands as one of the most significant aspects of late medieval science. Yet as Edith Sylla has observed, because qualities and quantities pertain to different categories in Aristotelian theory, one might expect Aristotelian theorists to avoid quantifying qualities. Even more serious still, the very task of quantifying physical qualities exposes a tension in the nature of science that was discussed first by Aristotle in his Posterior Analytics.

Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy 5, 2023

The late-scholastic school of Scotism (after John Duns Scotus, † 1308) had considerable room for disagreement. This volume innovatively demonstrates just how vividly Scotist philosophers and theologians discussed cognitive matters from the 14th until the 17th century. It further shows how the Scotist ideas were received in Protestant and Reformed milieus. Introduction 1. Claus A. Andersen: Short Introduction to a Long Tradition – And to this Volume I. Sensory Cognition 2. Daniel Heider: Suárez vs. Mastri and Belluto on Species in the Internal Sense 3. David González Ginocchio: The Estimative Faculty in Scotus and Scotism II. Intellectual Cognition 4. Giorgio Pini: In God’s Mind – Divine Cognition in Duns Scotus and Some Early Scotists 5. Marina Fedeli: The Species Intelligibilis in the Cognitive Process in Early Scotism – The Case of William of Alnwick 6. Damian Park O.F.M.: The Non-Beatific Vision of God in the Present Life – Franciscus de Mayronis’s Relational Theory of Cognition 7. Anna Tropia: Francisco Macedo on Intuitive and Abstractive Cognition III. Metaphysical and Theological Implications 8. Richard Cross: Esse intentionale in Some Early Scotists – At the Origins of the So-called ‘Supertranscendental’ 9. Francesco Fiorentino: Esse cognitum and Divine Ideas in the First Two Centuries of Scotism 10. Roberto Hofmeister Pich: Alfonso Briceño on Cognition, Distinction, and the Knowledge of God 11. Lukáš Novák: Making Room for the Virtual Distinction – Bartolomeo Mastri between Scylla and Charybdis 12. Claus A. Andersen: Decretum Concomitans – Bartolomeo Mastri on Divine Cognition and Human Freedom IV. The Influence of Scotism 13. Ueli Zahnd: The Epistemological Limits of Religious Images – On the Scotist Sources of a Reformed Theological Tenet 14. Arthur Huiban: Melanchthon and the Will – An Early Protestant Reception of Scotist Psychology? 15. Giovanni Gellera: Univocity of Being, the Cogito and Idealism in Johannes Clauberg (1622-1665)

M. Brinzei and Ch. Schabel (ed.), Philosophical Psychology in Late Medieval Commentaries on the Sentences, Brepols, 2020

AURÉLIEN ROBERT hose philosophers who nowadays are still interested in the possibility of forming natural concepts or ideas of substances generally assume that this question originated in early-modern philosophy. 1 These philosophers usually have in mind René Descartes' Second Meditation, in which he asks whether the human mind is able to know the essence of a piece of wax while its properties change, or whether the human mind can distinguish the kind of things that lie behind the hats and coats of passersby. 2 As is well known, several discussions followed Descartes' proposal of his own thesis, according to which our ideas of substances cannot be derived merely from sense perception. As a consequence, the possibility of having clear and distinct ideas of material and spiritual substances became a central topic in seventeenth-and eighteenth-century cognitive psychology.

The Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics (S.M.L.M.) is a network of scholars founded with the aim of fostering collaboration and research based on the recognition that  recovering the profound metaphysical insights of medieval thinkers for our own philosophical thought is highly desirable, and, despite the vast conceptual changes in the intervening period, is still possible; but  this recovery is only possible if we carefully reflect on the logical framework in which those insights were articulated, given the paradigmatic differences between medieval and modern logical theories.

Although early-modern Franciscans are predominantly known as preachers, theologians, and religious authors, several of them also had scientific interests as well. One of the more intriguing among them was Ilario Altobelli (1560-1637), a friend of Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), mentioned by Johannes Kepler (1571-1630) and other famous modern astronomers. In his works, Altobelli reveals to know the most important astronomical questions of his time but he seems to maintain a scientific and open mind when he indirectly comparing different world systems, without deciding for a definitive choose because of the absence of true demonstrations.

2018

American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, 2016

This article investigates an aporia in the metaphysical thought of John Duns Scotus. On the one hand, there are strong textual grounds for saying that according to Scotus the subject matter of metaphysics excludes logical being. On this reading, metaphysics would be a transcendental, but not a supertranscendental, science. On the other hand, there are strong textual grounds for saying that according to Scotus the subject matter of metaphysics includes logical being. On this reading, metaphysics would be a supertranscendental, and not just a transcendental, science. Two possible paths for resolving this aporia are considered and subsequently problematized. The aporia seems to be genuine, and recognition of this fact brings into sharper focus the position of Scotus’s metaphysics in the development of supertranscendental thought.