This book provides the Latin text and its annotated English translation of the question-commentary of John Buridan (ca. 1300-1360) on Aristotle's "On the Soul". Buridan was the most influential Parisian nominalist philosopher of his time. His work speaks across centuries to our modern concerns in the philosophy of mind. This volume completes the project of a volume published earlier in the same series: "Questions on the Soul by John Buridan and Others". An appealing book for scholars of Aristotle and those who are in the field of Medieval philosophy.

This volume considers the contemporary relevance of Aquinas' thought and what parameters should influence its reception. It discusses the reception of Aquinas on creation ex nihilo and offers guidelines for reception in the fields of metaphysics and natural theology. Chapters on physics and philosophy of mind intersect with key modern debates. Contributions interpret Aquinas' physics in light of contemporary findings and discuss his account of human self-awareness.

There is broad agreement in the medieval tradition that we conceive things in the world owing to the transmission of intelligible content through various media that culminates in the concept by which something in the world is cognitively present for us. Yet how the intelligible content is transmitted along with the nature of the ultimate object of cognition provoked ceaseless debate. The first three essays in Universal Representation, and the Ontology of Individuation consider these issues as they play out in the metaphysics and natural philosophy of Avicenna, Averroes, Thomas Aquinas, Ockham...

Knowledge, Mental Language, and Free Will traverses the medieval philosophical landscape of metaphysics, logic and natural philosophy. Alexander W. Hall discusses Thomas Aquinas’s interpretation of Aristotle’s doctrine of per se predication as it occurs in the conclusion of scientific demonstrations, i.e., of arguments producing scientific knowledge in the strict sense. Henrik Lagerlund and Catarina Dutilh Novaes take up medieval studies of mental language in the writings of Peter of Ailly and William Ockham. Works in this genre seek to discern what concepts are concepts of, the...

Medieval Skepticism, and the Claim to Metaphysical Knowledge presents three sets of essays. The first is an exchange between Antoine Côté and Charles Bolyard over Siger of Brabant’s strategy to silence the skeptic by discriminating between nobler and lesser senses and grounding certitude in sense perceptions. Second is another scholarly exchange, between Rondo Keele and Jack Zupko, over what Keele describes as Walter Chatton’s attempt to discredit Ockhamist nominalism by means of both an ‘anti-razor’, employed by Chatton to prescribe ontological commitment, and an argument strategy...

It is supposed to be common knowledge in the history of ideas that one of the few medieval philosophical contributions preserved in modern philosophical thought is the idea that mental phenomena are distinguished from physical phenomena by their intentionality, their directedness toward some object. As is usually the case with such commonplaces about the history of ideas, especially those concerning medieval ideas, this claim is not quite true. Medieval philosophers routinely described ordinary physical phenomena, such as reflections in mirrors or sounds in the air, as exhibiting...

For medieval thinkers, the distinction between intentional and extra-mental reality does not precipitate a Kantian turn to the subject. Rather, they allow that metaphysics and natural philosophy study things as they are and leave to logic the investigation of things as conceived. Within this broad scheme, there is much room for debate regarding whether and to what extent Aristotle’s categories comprise an accurate picture of what types of things exist. Closely tied to consideration of what types of things exist are questions concerning how language reflects the relations that hold among...

The Immateriality of the Human Mind, the Semantics of Analogy, and the Conceivability of God brings together the work of experts in the field of medieval philosophy to consider the nature of God and the soul, what can be known of the divine essence and the semantics of theological discourse from the perspectives of medieval theology (both natural and revealed), logic and natural philosophy. In his capacity as an arts master commenting on a work of natural philosophy, Aristotle’s De Anima, John Buridan discusses the immateriality of the intellect against the background of the competing,...

This volume presents three sets of papers discussing the medieval problem of singular cognition, nominalist epistemology, and the metaphysics of the great medieval nominalist philosopher, John Buridan. The first group of essays concerns issues surrounding the possibility of singular cognition in light of the cognitive psychology of Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, as well as the latter’s “argument from indifference” as developed by William Ockham to support his own, nominalist epistemology. However, Ockham’s epistemology, worked out in detail by John Buridan, seems to have implications...