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Introduction: The World as a Stereogram

This paper presents the historically most important theories of how visual perception is made spatial in the cognitive processing of the sensory input to the eye. All of them involve active engagement of the mind. Firstly, in the medieval theories physiological processes developed three-dimensional imagery in the brain, and active mental processing was needed to build coherence in the perceptual experience as a whole but not to yield the basic idea of spatiality. Secondly, according to Descartes, the eyes produced a unified two-dimensional visual image that was neurally transmitted to the inner surface of the brain. The innate conception of three-dimensional spatiality was superimposed inte…

Locating the Self Within the Soul – Thirteenth-Century Discussions

According to the traditional picture of the history of Western philosophy the High Middle Ages was intellectually Aristotelian, dominated by the Thomist approach. To some extent, this picture was formed already in the Early Modern Era, when many important thinkers distinguished their own philosophy from that of the scholastics. The university philosophy rejected by Descartes, for example, was indeed characteristically Aristotelian, and to a considerable extent even based on a thirteenth-century interpretation of Aristotle by Thomas Aquinas. It may be true that the scholastic philosophy, superseded in the seventeenth century by new approaches, was a direct extension of certain Classical tren…

Will in Early Modern Philosophy

Early modern philosophy inherited from the Middle Ages various very elaborate concepts of the will. It seems that little philosophical depth was added to the analyses of these concepts during this period. Rather, it is characteristic of the early modern discussions that traditional distinctions and theories were re-evaluated in new contexts, among which the mechanical approach to natural philosophy is of particular importance. Many philosophers were opposed to what was called ‘scholastic subtlety’, and defended instead very straightforward theories of the will.

Matthew of Aquasparta

The Structure of Self-Consciousness: A Fourteenth-Century Debate

Cartesian Psychology – Could There Be One?

The chapter examines what it would mean to talk about “psychology” in Descartes’ terms and argues that within the Cartesian framework we cannot really formulate the questions that are posed by contemporary psychologists. This results from the fact that psychological topics can be found on all three levels of Cartesian science: in metaphysics, in physics and finally in the applied sciences, such as medicine and morals. The aim is to show that the sensory and vegetative functions are often taken together by Descartes. Therefore, the Cartesian system does not recognize any principal difference between sensory functions, such as vision, and vegetative functions, such as digestion. Humans can be…

Duties, Rules and Interpretations in Obligational Disputations

An obligational disputation, as it was known in the Middle Ages, consisted basically of a sequence of propositions put forward by one person, called the opponent, and evaluated by another person, called the respondent. In the most typical variations of the technique, the sequence would begin with a special proposition, called the positum It was taken as the starting point, which the rest of the sequence would develop. The respondent had to accept the positum, if it was free from contradictions. Then he had to take into account in his later evaluations of the other propositions that he must at any time during the disputation grant the positum and anything following from it. The disputations …

Formalizing Medieval Logical Theories: Suppositio, Consequentiae and Obligationes

Obligations and Conditionals

The paper considers two kinds of medieval obligational disputations (positio, rei veritas) and the medieval genre of sophismata in relation to the kinds of inferences accepted in them. The main texts discussed are the anonymous Obligationes parisienses from the early 13th century and Richard Kilvington’s Sophismata from the early 14th century. Four different kinds of warranted transition from an antecedent to a consequent become apparent in the medieval discussions: (1) the strong logical validity of basic propositional logic, (2) analytic validity based on conceptual containment, (3) merely semantic impossibility of the antecedent being true without the consequent, and (4) intuitively true…

Perceiving One’s Own Body

Peter John Olivi