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Introduction
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The Early Albertus Magnus and his Arabic Sources on the Theory of the Soul
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Albertus Magnus favours the Aristotelian definition of the soul as the first actuality or perfection of a natural body having life potentially. But he interprets Aristotle's vocabulary in a way that it becomes compatible with the separability of the soul from the body. The term “perfectio” is understood as referring to the soul's activity only, not to its essence. The term “forma” is avoided as inadequate for defining the soul's essence. The soul is understood as a substance which exists independently of its actions and its body. The article shows that Albertus' terminological decisions continue a tradition reaching from the Greek commentators, and John Philoponos in particular, to Avicenna. Albertus' position on another important issue is also influenced by Arabic sources. His defense of the unity of the soul's vegetative, animal and rational parts rests on arguments from Avicenna and Averroes. It is shown that Averroes' position on the problem is not clearcut: he advocates the unity thesis, but also teaches the plurality of the generic and individual forms in man. This double stance is visible in the Latin reception of Averroes' works, and also in Albertus, who presents Averroes both as supporter and opponent of the plurality thesis.
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The Inner Cathedral: Mental Architecture in High Scholasticism
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Mediaeval psychological theory was a “faculty psychology”: a confederation of semiautonomous sub-personal agents, the interaction of which constitutes our psychological experience. One such faculty was intellective appetite, that is, the will. On what grounds was the will taken to be a distinct faculty? After a brief survey of Aristotle's criteria for identifying and distinguishing mental faculties, I look in some detail at the mainstream mediaeval view, given clear expression by Thomas Aquinas, and then at the dissenting views of John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham. I conclude with some reflections on why the mainstream mediaeval view was discarded by Descartes.
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Some Varieties of Semantic Externalism in Duns Scotus's Cognitive Psychology
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According to Scotus, an intelligible species with universal content, inherent in the mind, is a partial cause of an occurrent cognition whose immediate object is the self-same species. I attempt to explain how Scotus defends the possibility of this causal activity. Scotus claims, generally, that forms are causes, and that inherence makes no difference to the capacity of a form to cause an effect. He illustrates this by examining a case in which an accident is an instrument of a substance in the production of a certain sort of effect. All that is required is that the accident is relevantly joined to the substance, whether or not it inheres in the substance. Since intelligible species are bearers of semantic content, it follows that non-inherent objects of thought can also be the bearers of such content. Such objects are included in the mind without inherence, and the boundary between the mind and external reality is to this extent broken down.
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Why Is Thought Linguistic? Ockham's Two Conceptions of the Intellect
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One of Ockham's fundamental tenets about the human intellect is that its acts constitute a mental language. Although this language of thought shares some of the features of conventional language, thought is commonly considered as prior to conventional language. This paper tries to show that this consensus is seriously challenged in Ockham's early writings. I shall argue that, in claiming the priority of conventional language over mental language, Ockham established a novel explanation of the systematicity of thought—an explanation which anticipates the idea that thought becomes systematic through the acquisition of conventional language.
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Ame intellective, âme cogitative: Jean de Jandun et la duplex forma propria de l'homme
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The article analyses the idea that according to the averroist Jean de Jandun, Master of Arts in Paris at the beginning of the 14th century, human beings are composed of a «double form» the separated intellect on the one hand, the cogitative soul on the other hand. After recalling several major accounts of the time, we explore Jean's reading of Averroes' major conceptions concerning the problem. Finally, we challenge the idea according to which we observe in his writings the radical thesis of a sometimes cogitating sometimes thinking «double human being» that makes of the homo intelligens a punctual and exclusive new being, which is accidentally produced while the thinking takes place.
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Diversité des fonctions et unité de l'âme dans la psychologie péripatéticienne (XIVe-XVIe siècle)
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The question of the unity of the soul is posed in the Midle Ages, at the crossing point of the Aristotelician theory, which distinguishes several potencies, even several parts in the soul, and the Augustinian doctrine, which underlines the unity of the mind using corporeal powers. John Buridan, when commenting the Treatise on the Soul of Aristotle, emphasizes the unity, probably in reaction against John of Jandun's position. From the middle of 14th century till the end of 17th, this problem goes on being debated through the two questions of the substantial unity of the soul and of the the relation between the soul and its potencies. This article studies some stages of this development, some of them immediately after Buridan, in Nicole Oresme's and Peter of Ailly's positions, another more distant, in Antoine Rubio's work. It suggests that we find still the same problematics, reelaborated and transformed, in Descartes.
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From an Outsider's Point of View: Lorenzo Valla on the Soul
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In his Repastinatio. . . Lorenzo Valla launched a heavy attack on Aristotelian-scholastic thought. While most of this book is devoted to metaphysics, language and argumentation, Valla also incorporates chapters on the soul and natural philosophy. Using as criteria good Latin, common sense and common observation, he rejected much of standard Aristotelian teaching on the soul, replacing the hylopmorphic account of the scholastics by an Augustinian one. In this article his arguments on the soul's autonomy, nobility and independency from the body are studied and analysed. His critique of Aristotle's opinions on natural phenomena as being untrue to what we observe will also be briefly studied. His arguments do not show him always to be deep or consistent thinker, but the critical review of Aristotelian philosophy proceeds from some philosophically interesting assumptions. Moreover, from a broader historical perspective his undermining of Aristotle's authority may be regarded as a contribution to the final demise of the Aristotelian paradigm, even though the humanist critique was just one factor in this process.
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Cardano's Eclectic Psychology and its Critique by Julius Caesar Scaliger
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This paper examines the theories of the soul proposed by Girolamo Cardano in his De immortalitate animorum (1545) and his De subtilitate (1550-4), Julius Caesar Scaliger's comprehensive critique of these views in the Exercitationes exotericae de subtilitate of 1557, and Cardano's reply to this critique in his Actio in calumniatorem of 1559. Cardano argues that the passive intellect is individuated and mortal, and that the agent intellect is immortal but subject to constant reincarnation in different human beings. His theory of cognition leads him to claim that at its highest level, the intellect is converted into the object of its perception. In his refutation of the various elements of Cardano's theories, Scaliger uses his knowledge of the Greek text of Aristotle to stress the reflexive faculty of the soul, its ability to conceive of objects greater than itself, and its status as the individuating principle of the hylemorphic human being. In spite of Cardano's pretention to novelty and Scaliger's humanist credentials, both thinkers are shown to conduct their discussions in an inherited scholastic matrix of thought.
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Cartesian Scientia and the Human Soul
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Descartes's conception of matter changed the account of physical nature in terms of extension and related quantitative terms. Plants and animals were turned into species of machines, whose natural functions can be explained mechanistically. This article reflects on the consequences of this transformation for the psychology of human soul. In so far the soul is rational it lacks extension, yet it is also united with the body and affected by it, and so it is able to act on extended matter. The article examines Descartes's concept of scientia and his different uses of nature, and argues that there is much more continuity between Aristotelian and Cartesian psychology than is usually recognized when it comes to an explanation of the functions of the embodied human soul. If this makes psychology unfit for inclusion in the new science of nature, its object is still a natural phenomenon and has an important place within scientia as Descartes conceived of it.
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Marin Cureau de la Chambre on the Natural Cognition of the Vegetative Soul: An Early Modern Theory of Instinct
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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.
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Contents Volume 46 (2008)
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