Search results for "Medieval philosophy"

Cognitive Dispositions in the Psychology of Peter John Olivi

2018

This chapter discusses Peter John Olivi’s (1248–1298) conception of the role of dispositions (habitus) in sensory cognition from metaphysical and psychological perspectives. It shows that Olivi makes a distinction between two general types of disposition. Some of them account for the ease, or difficulty, with which different persons use their cognitive powers, while others explain why people react differently to things that they perceive or think. This distinction is then applied to Olivi’s analysis of three different psychological operations, where the notion of disposition figures prominently; estimative perception, perceptual clarity, and the perception of pain and pleasure. The chapter …

Perceiving As : Non-conceptual Forms of Perception in Medieval Philosophy

2019

This chapter focuses on thirteenth-century Latin discussions concerning the psychological processes that explain some of the most sophisticated features of perceptual experience. Sense perception primarily conveys information about the sensible qualities of external objects; we see colours, hear sounds, taste flavours, and so forth. Yet, our experience of the external world contains several elements that cannot be reduced to these qualities. To name a few, external objects are perceived as three-dimensional bundles of properties, as useful or harmful for the perceiving subject, and as objects of desires, fears, and other emotions, and they are conceptualised in various ways—in short, they a…

In the first person: Avicenna’s concept of self-awarenessreconstructed

2015

Duties, Rules and Interpretations in Obligational Disputations

2001

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 …

Animal consciousness : Peter Olivi on cognitive functions of the sensitive soul

2009

Medieval Commentators on Simultaneous Perception : An Edition of Commentaries on Aristotle's De sensu et sensato 7

2021

Extending the Limits of Nature. Political Animals, Artefacts, and Social Institutions

2020

This essay discusses how medieval authors from the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries dealt with a philosophical problem that social institutions pose for the Aristotelian dichotomy between natural and artificial entities. It is argued that marriage, political community, and language provided a particular challenge for the conception that things which are designed by human beings are artefacts. Medieval philosophers based their arguments for the naturalness of social institutions on the anthropological view that human beings are political animals by nature, but this strategy required rethinking the borderline between nature and art. The limits of nature were extended, as social institution…