Continuity and Innovation in Medieval and Modern Philosophy

2013 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Private Language ◽  
Philosophical Position ◽  
Faculty Psychology ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Muslim Scholars

The usual division of philosophy into ‘medieval’ and ‘modern’ obscures the continuities in philosophy up until 1700. This book examines three areas where these continuities are particularly clear: knowledge, the mind, and language. It does so through three chapters, by different authors, each followed by a detailed response. The first chapter shows how Descartes attacked faculty psychology and thus separated himself from one strand of the medieval tradition, represented by Suárez. At the same time, Descartes was closely following another strand, found in Ockham. Thus, the discontinuity between medieval and modern may not be as sharp as first appears. The second chapter considers discussions of whether knowledge should be kept for the elite. In the Christian world medieval and seventeenth-century thinkers alike rarely advocated esotericism, but Jewish and Muslim scholars such as al-Ghazâlî, Averroes, and Maimonides strongly defended it. The main chapter of Part III argues that a version of such esotericism may be a defensible philosophical position today. The main chapter of Part II shows how Locke's philosophy of language fits into a long medieval tradition of thought based on Aristotle's On Interpretation. Locke introduced the requirement that a word be linked to an idea in the speaker's mind, but the chapter argues that this does not mean that Locke was proposing that we each have a private language.

Neurologist, 13 years’ experience, Italy

2020 ◽  
pp. 160-161
Author(s):  
Markus Reuber ◽  
Gregg H. Rawlings ◽  
Steven C. Schachter
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Modern Philosophy ◽  
Human Body ◽  
Scientific Community ◽  
Physical Property ◽  
Epileptic Seizures ◽  
Unified View ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Two Sides ◽  
The Brain

This chapter studies how challenging it is to communicate a diagnosis of Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizures to patients. This could be due to the inability of one’s reasoning to get rid of the dualistic distinction of the mind from the brain. Plato was the first to believe that the soul, this indistinct, immaterial, and immortal entity devoid of any physical property, was imprisoned in the human body. Since then, this view has become deeply rooted among laypeople and even in the scientific community. The “substance dualism” was further elaborated by René Descartes in the seventeenth century and has its counterpart in the “mind–brain identity theory” discussed in modern Philosophy and Psychology. This dualism underlies the divide between Neurology and Psychiatry and has dissolved their harmonious primeval unity. Neurology is nowadays devoted to the diagnosis and treatment of disorders of the brain, whereas Psychiatry focuses on problems of the mind, as if it were possible to separate what, in reality, are two sides of the same coin. Hopefully, a better understanding of Psychogenic Non-Epileptic Seizures will bring people a step closer to producing a unified view of the human being.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Wolterstorff
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Mental Activity ◽  
Philosophy Of Art ◽  
Liturgical Theology ◽  
Ritual Studies ◽  
Subsequent Discussion ◽  
Art Philosophy ◽  
Almost All ◽  
The Mind

This chapter considers why contemporary analytic philosophers of religion have neglected liturgy and focused almost all of their attention on religious belief. Following Descartes, reflections on mental activity and the mind have been central in modern philosophy. But that has not prevented the emergence of philosophy of art, philosophy of language, and political philosophy, none of which deal with mental activity or the mind. So why not philosophy of liturgy? Several explanations are considered; but none is found to be fully satisfactory. The Introduction concludes with an explanation of how the subsequent discussion relates to liturgical theology and to anthropological ritual studies.

scholarly journals The Double Intentionality of Moral Intentional Actions: Scotus and Ockham on Interior and Exterior Acts

Topoi ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sonja Schierbaum
Keyword(s):  
Intentional Action ◽  
Faculty Psychology ◽  
Intentional Actions ◽  
The Mind

AbstractAny account of intentional action has to deal with the problem of how such actions are individuated. Medieval accounts, however, crucially differ from contemporary ones in at least three respects: (i) for medieval authors, individuation is not a matter of description, as it is according to contemporary, ‘Anscombian’ views; rather, it is a metaphysical matter. (ii) Medieval authors discuss intentional action on the basis of faculty psychology, whereas contemporary accounts are not committed to this kind of psychology. Connected to the use of faculty psychology is (iii) the distinction between interior and exterior acts. Roughly, interior acts are mental as opposed to physical acts, whereas exterior acts are acts of physical powers, such as of moving one’s body. Of course, contemporary accounts are not committed to this distinction between two ontologically different kinds of acts. Rather, they might be committed to views consistent with physicalist approaches to the mind. The main interpretative task in this paper is to clarify how Scotus and Ockham explain moral intentional action in terms of the role and involvement of these kinds of acts respectively. I argue that Scotus’s account is close to contemporary, ‘Anscombian’ accounts, whereas Ockham’s account is incompatible with them.

The Fragmented Mind

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Implicit Attitudes ◽  
David Lewis ◽  
Belief System ◽  
Belief State ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Relationship

Mental fragmentation is the thesis that the mind is fragmented, or compartmentalized. Roughly, this means that an agent’s overall belief state is divided into several sub-states—fragments. These fragments need not make for a consistent and deductively closed belief system. The thesis of mental fragmentation became popular through the work of philosophers like Christopher Cherniak, David Lewis, and Robert Stalnaker in the 1980s. Recently, it has attracted great attention again. This volume is the first collection of essays devoted to the topic of mental fragmentation. It features important new contributions by leading experts in the philosophy of mind, epistemology, and philosophy of language. Opening with an accessible Introduction providing a systematic overview of the current debate, the fourteen essays cover a wide range of issues: foundational issues and motivations for fragmentation, the rationality or irrationality of fragmentation, fragmentation’s role in language, the relationship between fragmentation and mental files, and the implications of fragmentation for the analysis of implicit attitudes.

The diary of a madman, seventeenth-century style: Goodwin Wharton, MP and communer with the fairy world

1986 ◽  
Vol 16 (3) ◽  
pp. 503-513 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roy Porter
Keyword(s):  
Mental Illness ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Public Life ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Mind

SynopsisGoodwin Wharton (1653–1704) was a nobleman's son and a Whig MP who played no small part in English public life. His manuscript journal shows, however, that he also lived a bizarre secret life of the mind of a kind which, in later generations, would have led to his confinement as suffering from mental illness. Above all, through the offices of his medium and lover, Mary Parish, he entered into elaborate relations both with the fairy world and with God and His Angels. This paper examines our records of Wharton's consciousness

scholarly journals Linguistic Mistakes

Erkenntnis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Indrek Reiland
Keyword(s):  
Philosophy Of Language ◽  
Private Language ◽  
Common View ◽  
Philos Stud ◽  
The Common ◽  
Semantic Correctness ◽  
Clear Cases

AbstractEver since the publication of Kripke’s Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, there’s been a raging debate in philosophy of language over whether meaning and thought are, in some sense, normative. Most participants in the normativity wars seem to agree that some uses of meaningful expressions are semantically correct while disagreeing over whether this entails anything normative. But what is it to say that a use of an expression is semantically correct? On the so-called orthodox construal, it is to say that it doesn’t result in a factual mistake, that is, in saying or thinking something false. On an alternative construal it is instead to say that it doesn’t result in a distinctively linguistic mistake, that is, in misusing the expression. It is natural to think that these two construals of semantic correctness are simply about different things and not necessarily in competition with each other. However, this is not the common view. Instead, several philosophers who subscribe to the orthodox construal have argued that the alternative construal of correctness as use in accordance with meaning doesn’t make any sense, partly because there are no clear cases of linguistic mistakes (Whiting in Inquiry, 59:219–238, 2016, Wikforss in Philos Stud 102:203–226, 2001). In this paper I develop and defend the idea that there’s a distinctively linguistic notion of correctness as use in accordance with meaning and argue that there are clear cases of linguistic mistakes.

Philosophy

Unfelt ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 24-68
Author(s):  
James Noggle
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
David Hume ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Eliza Haywood ◽  
Robert Boyle ◽  
David Hartley ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Mental Contents

This chapter examines how the late seventeenth-century British philosophy of sensation, feeling, and selfhood responded to the challenges of mechanism with the idiom of the insensible. It shows how this idiom carries forward from John Locke and Robert Boyle to philosophers of the mid-eighteenth century, the age of sensibility, who use it to address a variety of problems. The consistent, Lockean element in these usages by David Hartley, Étienne Bonnet de Condillac and David Hume, Eliza Haywood and Adam Smith, is that they do not refer to mental contents. One does not hear of “insensible perceptions.” There are no “unconscious thoughts” or “unfelt sensations” in the British tradition surveyed here. Writers in this tradition rather describe insensible powers that affect the mind without themselves being mental. They are nonconscious, not unconscious. This is an implication carried by the idiom into articulations of quite a wide variety of other ideas. All of them indicate the persistent usefulness in philosophies of feeling of a stylistic gesture toward something beyond the reach of both feeling and philosophy.

Equivocation, Donne, and the Political Interior

2019 ◽  
pp. 19-44
Author(s):  
Todd Butler
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
John Donne ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
The Political ◽  
Royal Power ◽  
Political Conflicts ◽  
Political Citizenship ◽  
Deliberative Processes ◽  
The Mind

As a tactic that sought to enable individuals to answer judicial interrogatories while simultaneously disguising the full substance and meaning of their answers, the Catholic doctrine of equivocation responded to the precarious position of Catholics in the late Elizabethan and early Jacobean eras. In providing a highly contested model for the shielding of one’s thoughts, equivocation also demonstrates the centrality of human cognition to the religious and political conflicts of the seventeenth century. Writers such as John Donne (Ignatius His Conclave) and Francis Bacon (Essays) evidence a similarly deep concern with the mind and its deliberative processes as marking boundaries for political citizenship and royal power. Viewed in these terms, mental reservation and equivocation become less a matter of theology than one of statecraft.

The Work of the Words

2020 ◽  
pp. 57-98
Author(s):  
Megan Kaes Long
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Text Setting ◽  
Tonal Language ◽  
Close Relationship ◽  
Organizational Framework ◽  
Musical Systems ◽  
Regular Text ◽  
The Mind ◽  
The Way

Composers of homophonic partsongs developed formulaic text-setting schemas that translated poetic meter into musical meter: line lengths determine phrase lengths, poetic accents establish musical accents, and poetic form controls cadences and formal boundaries. Consequently, text-setting establishes an increasingly deep mensural hierarchy. At the same time, schematic text-setting codifies an organizational framework that parallels the way the mind constructs musical meter. According to dynamic attending theory, listener attention peaks in response to environmental regularities; this theory suggests that regular metrical frameworks like those in homophonic partsongs facilitate tonal expectation by drawing listener attention toward metrically accented harmonic events. Regular text-setting contributes to musical meter in a period when mensural structures are giving way to metrical ones. A new metrical style and a new tonal language emerge in tandem in the early seventeenth century, and the balletto repertoire highlights the close relationship between these evolving musical systems.

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