Confirmed Speakers and Schedule

11:00 Tianyue Wu (Peking University)
 "Aquinas on Human Personhood and Dignity"

12:00 Dominik Perler (Humboldt Universität Berlin)
"Suárez's Compositional Account of
Substance"

12:00-14:00 lunch break

14:00 Rodrigo Ballon Villanueva (Università della Svizzera Italiana) 
"Eriugena Against the Standard Account of Relations in the Middle Ages" 


15:00 Roxane Nöel  (University of Cambridge)
"John of Salisbury’s Nominalism and the Virtuous Quest for Happiness"

​***

ABSTRACTS

Tianyue Wu, Peking University
"Aquinas on Human Personhood and Dignity"


Modern commentators are divided on Aquinas’s theory of human dignity: some were excited to find a contemporary conception of inherent or unearned worth of human beings in Aquinas’s claim that each person is immediately given a certain dignity simply because of its ontological status as a rational individual; whereas others insisted that what Aquinas had in mind was still a more traditional conception of moral worth based upon one’s merits. In this context, this essay endeavors to reconstruct a philosophical account of personal dignity from Aquinas’s theological reflections on hypostasis, person, rationality and dignity. In particular, it will examine his interpretation of the definition of person as “a hypostasis distinct by a property pertaining to dignity”. I will argue that by commenting on this “dignity definition of person”, Aquinas develops an insightful account of human dignity as a personal property (proprietas personalis), which is deeply rooted in a rational substance whose existence cannot be shared, communicated or repeated. It will be shown that personal dignity is neither a merit-based value nor an abstract claim related to the nature of human species, but rather a specific sort of normative force that is grounded on the incommunicable existence of a rational being. 

Dominik Perler (Humboldt-Universität, Berlin)
"Suárez’s Compositional Account of Substance"

According to Francisco Suárez, a substance is composed of many things: form, matter, qualities and other accidents. All of them have their own essence and existence, and all of them are really distinct from each other. In making this claim, Suárez defends a compositional account of substance and radically transforms Aristotelian hylomorphism. This paper examines his reasons for this transformation by paying special attention to his reinterpretation of matter, which he takes to be a fundamental thing with actual and not just potential existence – a thing that is combined with many other things. It is argued that this new way of looking at a substance prepares the ground for a new way of doing metaphysics: we need to mentally decompose and recompose a substance. It is only when doing this kind of “reverse engineering” that we come to know what a substance is. 
 


Rodrigo Ballon Villanueva
University of Italian Switzerland 
Eriugena Against “the Standard Account” of Relations in the Middle Ages.
 
According to “the Standard Account” (TSA) of relations in the Middle Ages, medieval authors claimed that a) relations were monadic properties (instantiated by only one substance), and b) relations were real (as opposed to entia rationis). In this presentation, I am going to argue that the two claims of TSA do not apply in the case of the Carolingian philosopher John Scotus Eriugena (9th century). In other words, my interpretation will defend the view that not only did Eriugena consider relations to be polyadic properties, but also that his approach must be understood within the framework of his so-called idealism. For this purpose, my analysis will focus on Eriugena's treatment of the categories, paying special attention to the two relational ones, namely, ad aliquid and habitus.

Roxane Nöel  (University of Cambridge)
"John of Salisbury’s Nominalism and the Virtuous Quest for Happiness"John of Salisbury’s Nominalism and the Virtuous Quest for Happiness"
 

John of Salisbury is an important figure when it comes to understanding twelfth-century philosophy, but the interest of his writings is usually found more in his description of other views than in his own original ideas. I believe we should not underestimate the interest of his views on universals as expressed in his Metalogicon. This treatise is written as a defense of the arts of the trivium, namely grammar, dialectic (or logic) and rhetoric, and in it he aims to defend the use of teaching these classical arts. The purpose of this talk is to show how John of Salisbury’s nominalism, a view about ontology, is more adequately understood in the broader scheme of his metaphilosophy, which places the virtuous life as the goal of practicing philosophy. This is an unprecedented attempt to link a metaphysical position, usually examined in isolation, to his broader ethical framework. In doing so, I hope to show how we should, generally speaking, think about the links between metaphysical views and the implicit or explicit moral motivations for adopting them.

 
2-2:50pm Richard Sorabji (University of Oxford): ‘Medieval intentional objects’
 
2:50 – 3pm Break 
 
3-3:50pm Véronique Decaix (Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne) ‘Back to things. Memory as an intentional act in Albert the Great’ 
 
3:50-4:10pm Break
 
4:10-5pm Keqi Chen (University of Cambridge) 'Revisiting Anselm’s Ontological Argument from the Perspective of Modality’
 

 
* * *

PROGRAM
* * *
 
11:00 - 12:30  José Filipe Pereira da Silva (University of Helsinki)
“Incidental Perception and the Unity of Perceptual Experience in Francisco Suárez”
 
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch break
 
14:00 - 15:30 Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado Boulder & Institut d'Etudes Avancees de Paris)
“Medieval Modal Spaces”
  
15:30 – 16:00 Coffee/Tea break
 
16:00 – 17:30 Magdalena Bieniak (University of Warsaw)
“Stephen Langton on the Antinomies of Faith”

 
17:30 Conference ends
 
* * *

ABSTRACTS

"Incidental Perception and the Unity of Perceptual Experience in Francisco Suárez"

By José Filipe Silva (University of Helsinki)

In this talk, I elaborate on the results of a research paper written in collaboration with Carla di Martino for the ERC project Rationality in Perception. In the paper, we argue for the coexistence of two paradigms in Francisco Suárez’s account of sense perception: the classical Aristotelian causal model and the model we call ‘concomitant emergence’. According to the classical model, an external object is perceived because it causes an affection in the perceiver’s sense organs and this affection is in turn the cause of an image of that thing in the perceiver’s internal sense. According to the alternative model, the act of the internal sense is concomitant or concurrent with the act of the proper sense but not caused by it. Although the existence of two such models has been recognized in Suárez’s scholarship, there has been no systematic attempt to solve the exegetical and philosophical puzzle it raises. To do so is the main aim of the paper, and this is done by focusing on Suárez’s account of incidental perception. In his account, Suárez echoes the way in which Thomas Aquinas addressed incidental perception, but he went beyond the Thomist solution in a significant (and probably influential) way. To show how he does it and what it means for a (very) late medieval understanding of perceptual experience is the aim of this talk.

“Medieval Modal Spaces”

By Robert Pasnau (University of Colorado Boulder & Institut d'Etudes Avancees de Paris)

It is widely agreed that there is something peculiar about premodern conceptions of necessity and possibility. As Sarah Broadie complained long ago, Aristotle’s ways of connecting modality and time “find no echo in the standard modern treatment of these modalities.” For the centuries that run through later antiquity and into the early Middle Ages, the situation hardly become more familiar until, as the usual historical narrative goes, the turn of the fourteenth century, when John Duns Scotus decisively reframed the issues. I wish to argue that this impression of dramatic discontinuity, bridged by sudden innovation, is almost entirely a misimpression. Premodern modal thought is not generally as alien as it looks, and Scotus’s alleged innovations are in large part neither his own nor reflective of a dramatic reconception of basic modal principles. But this is by no means to suggest that the history of modal thought lacks the sort of provocative departures from current orthodoxy that give the work of prior generations its abiding interest. On the contrary, premodern philosophers, rather than help themselves to the wide-open modal space of all possible worlds, tend to restrict their attention, even in modal contexts, to the actual world. This tendency can make premodern modal talk look wholly alien, if not simply confused. Yet it is not at all clear that our wide-open modal spaces are as helpful as we assume in thinking about modal claims.
 
“Stephen Langton on the Antinomies of Faith”

By Magdalena Bieniak (University of Warsaw)
​
Faith, understood either as a propositional attitude or as a propositional content, is one of the central topics discussed in Book 3 of Stephen Langton’s Theological Questions (a critical edition of Books 2-4 is in progress). The aim of this paper is to present major traits of Langton’s theory of faith by focusing on four antinomies he discusses: (1) Belief: natural and supernatural. On the one hand, Langton claims that anyone is capable of believing; on the other, he adopts the definition of the virtue of faith as “a quality of the mind by means of which God acts in man without man”. Thus, even though it is true that Peter is able to believe, he is unable to be faithful, since being faithful is a quality. (2) Faith: fallible and infallible. Langton discusses a number of cases in which the same meritorious belief is apparently both true and false at the same time. (3) Articles of faith: variable and invariable. One of the fundamental claims is that faith in the articles cannot fail, because the articles are universally true. And yet what had been true for Abraham was, apparently, false for Innocent III: Abraham believed that Christ would be born in the future, while Innocent believed, instead, that Christ had been born in the past. (4) Conviction: explicit and implicit. Langton claims that it is necessary to believe in all the articles, but it is not necessary to know them all explicitly. Yet the validity of this principle seems to be threatened by the case of an unlearned person who falls prey to an insidious heretic.

PROGRAM:
 
11:30 - 12:30 Tom Pink (King’s College London)
“Final causation in early modern Jesuit thought: finality in nature and normative power”
 
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch break
 
14:00 - 15:00 Stephen Read (University of St Andrews)
“The Rule of Contradictory Pairs, Insolubles and Validity”
 
 
15:00 - 16:00 Lily King (University of South Florida)
“Reevaluating the Kantian Appraisal of Abelard’s Ethics”
 
16:00 – 16:30  Coffee/Tea break
 
16:30 – 17:30 Simon Hewitt (University of Leeds)
“Unravelling Stump's Non-Apophatic Aquinas”
 
17:30 Conference ends
 
* * *

ABSTRACTS:

“Final causation in early modern Jesuit thought: finality in nature and normative power”
 
By Thomas Pink (King’s College London)
 
In early modern Jesuit thought we find a restriction of final causation to the goal-directed agency of minds, and a denial that it is to be found in end-directed processes in wider nature. There is indeed some denial that ends operate as causes at all, even within the mind. The paper examines this development and distinguishes it from scepticism about final causation in early modern writers hostile to scholasticism. This Jesuit tradition is not sceptical of power exercised by ends, and the paper examines the continuing importance of this conception of power to their ethical and political theory, and especially to their theory of rationality and reason.
 
 “The Rule of Contradictory Pairs, Insolubles and Validity”
 
Stephen Read (University of St Andrews)
  
The Oxford Calculator Roger Swyneshed put forward three provocative theses in his treatise on insolubles, written in the early 1330s, of which the second claims that there is a formally valid inference with true premise and false conclusion. His example deployed the Liar paradox as the conclusion of the inference: 'This is false, so this is false'. His account of insolubles supported his claim that the conclusion is false, and so the premise, referring to the conclusion, would seem to be true. But what is his account of validity, that can allow true premises to lead to a false conclusion? We consider Roger's own account, as well as that of Paul of Venice, writing some sixty years later, whose account of the truth and falsehood of insolubles followed Roger's closely. Paul endorsed Roger's three theses. But their accounts of validity were different. The question is whether these accounts are coherent and support Paul's claim in his Logica Magna that he endorsed all the normal rules of formal validity.  
 
 “Reevaluating the Kantian Appraisal of Abelard’s Ethics”
By Lyly King (University of Florida)

Though there has been much debate about whether Abelard’s ethics are dangerously subjective or surprisingly absolutist, one thing is unanimous: they are intentionalist. The goal of this article is to parse out what, exactly, should be meant by this claim. Though much of the secondary literature on Abelard suggests that he has a “proto-Kantian” account of moral praiseworthiness, I argue that this is mistaken. As far as Abelard is concerned, one’s intention in acting is not the reason they supply for acting. Instead, intention is the desire motivating the action. This becomes clear when seeking to understand Abelard’s use of intentio with a view to his Commentary on Romans. Using the account of intentio I argue for—one nuanced by Abelard’s own theological commitments and biblical exegesis—Abelard’s ethics is not a case for the “moral neutrality of the passions.” Nor is it an ethic of “pure reason.” Instead, Abelard’s ethics is an affective intentionalism.
 
 “Unravelling Stump's Non-Apophatic Aquinas”
 
By Simon Hewitt (University of Leeds)
 
Prefacing q3 of the Prima Pars of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas - who takes himself to have established by this point that God exists - tells his reader that 'we cannot know what God is, but only what he is not. So to study him, we study what he has not'. The doctrine of divine simplicity which he then goes on to develop fits naturally with a reading of Aquinas as a mystical theologian, who thinks that God's nature is hidden from us, and that we are united with God 'as to one unknown' . This reading is commonplace amongst theologians and has found recent advocates in Davies, Turner and McCabe. Within analytic philosophy of religion, however, there has been a tendency to play down Aquinas' apophaticism. In this talk I take Elenore Stump's treatment of divine simplicity in her Aquinas as a case study, and argue against her reasons for thinking that Aquinas is not the apophaticist others have taken him to be.

Medieval Philosophy Network, 20th Meeting
21 November 2018
 The Bing room | The Warburg Institute | University of London | School of Advanced Study | Woburn Square | London WC1H 0AB
 
 
* * *
 
11:30 - 12:30 Christophe Erismann (University of Vienna)
“Aristotle, the Perpetuation of Species and some Byzantine Views on Providence”
 
12:30 - 14:00 Lunch break
 
14:00 - 15:00 Micky Engel (University of Hamburg)
“Averroes' Paraphrase of the De anima and the Problem of Universals in the Works of Medieval Jewish Aristotelians”
 
 
15:00 - 16:00 Dragos Calma (University College Dublin)
“Metaphysics as a Way of Life: A 15th-Century Model”
 
16:00 – 16:30 Coffee/Tea break
 
16:30 – 17:30 Damiano Costa (University of Italian Switzerland, Lugano)
““Was Bonaventure a Four-dimensionalist?”
 
17:30 Conference ends
 
* * *
ABSTRACTS
​
“Aristotle, the Perpetuation of Species and some Byzantine Views on Providence”
By Christophe Erismann (University of Vienna)
Tbc abstract
 
“Averroes' Paraphrase of the De anima and the Problem of Universals in the Works of Medieval Jewish Aristotelians”
By Mickey Engel (University of Hamburg)
 
Averroes' Epitome of the De anima (EDA) contains two interrelated discussions, one epistemological and the other logical/ontological. The first concerns the manner in which intelligibles are generated from sense data stored in the imaginary faculty. The second discussion concerns the relation between the intelligibles, once generated, and their particular correlatives outside the soul. In my talk I will present Averroes' arguments and their relation to the notion of human immortality, which is the focal point of the EDA. In the second part of my talk, I will illustrate the impact that Averroes' arguments and conclusions in the EDA had on Jewish philosophers during the Middle Ages.
 
“Metaphysics as a Way of Life : A 15th-Century Model”
By Dragos Calma (University College Dublin)
 
This paper challenges the commonly accepted view that between Late Antiquity and Modernity, philosophy rhymes both with abstract dialectical exercises and subordination to Christian theology. A closer examination of some 15th century overlooked texts, mostly transmitted in untapped manuscripts, provides a fresh understanding of the history of metaphysics. These texts claim that the capacity for providing a correct reading of the ontological structure of the world derives from the ability to both live a spiritual life and to lift the intellect above senses and singulars. They describe this process operating a stimulating and original concord of philosophical (Aristotle, Plotinus, Proclus) and Patristic sources (e.g. Origen, Clement of Alexandria) leading to what some contemporary scholars have called “metaphysics of the inner man”.
 
“Was Bonaventure a Four-dimensionalist?”
By Damiano Costa (University of Italian Switzerland, Lugano)
 
High scholastic authors usually adhere to a theory about the diachronic identity of substance that is nowadays called three-dimensionalism, according to which substances persist through time by being wholly present at each instant of their persistence. Recently, Richard Cross has argued that there is at least one exception to this rule, and that Bonaventure was a four-dimensionalist ante litteram. I argue that Bonaventure was no four-dimensionalist. Along the way, I explain how high scholastic accounts of persistence may or may not illuminate the contemporary debate on persistence.
 

Medieval Philosophy Network, 19th Meeting
3 July 2018
 The Bing room | The Warburg Institute | University of London | School of Advanced Study | Woburn Square | London WC1H 0AB
 
 * * *
​
11:30 - 12:30 Antonia Fitzpatrick (University of Oxford)
“Proper matter and material causation in the thought of Aquinas and the early ‘Thomists"

12:30 - 14:00 Lunch break
 
14:00 - 15:00 Sophia Vasalou (University of Birmingham)
“Virtue, Value, and the Law in al-Ghazali's Ethics”
 
 15:00 - 16:00 Tianyi Zhang (University of Cambridge)
“Suhrawardī on Light Metaphysics”
 
16:00 – 16:30 Coffee/Tea break
 
16:30 – 17:30 Kamil Majcherek (University of Cambridge)
“Ockham’s Theory of Artifacts and its Critics”
 
17:30 Conference ends
 
* * *

ABSTRACTS:
"Proper matter and material causation in the thought of Aquinas and the early ‘Thomists’ "
By Antonia Fitzpatrick (University of Oxford)
 
Aristotle makes matter central to his account of the composition of natural substances and his explanation for the ordered succession of substances in natural change (wine, for instance, corrupts only into vinegar, not into any other substance.) In Metaphysics VIII.4, he says that each substance has its ‘proper matter’. In Physics II.9, he explains that the material principle of natural change must necessarily be in a certain condition in order for a certain substance to come into being. This paper looks at the reception of these ideas in the thought of Thomas Aquinas and his early Dominican interpreters. It makes two arguments. The first is that Aquinas made more of these passages, and had a much more complex understanding of matter, than is generally understood. Aquinas is famous for holding that there is one and only one substantial form in each thing, and, as a corollary of this, that matter has no actuality of its own. And yet, Aquinas does appear to distinguish ‘prime matter’, in a state of pure or undifferentiated potency, from the matter that serves as the material principle in substantial generation. Certain prominent early ‘Thomists’, however, including John of Paris and Hervaeus Natalis, rejected this aspect of Aquinas’s thought on matter, and came close to jettisoning any meaningful account of material causation whatsoever. Why was this? The second argument is that these Dominicans had become convinced, with the help of specific arguments advanced by Franciscans in criticism of Aquinas, that such an account was incompatible with the theory of the unicity of form. Ultimately, then, the paper reflects on the Franciscan contribution to early ‘Thomism’. 

“Virtue, Value, and the Law in al-Ghazali's Ethics”
By Sophia Vasalou (University of Birmingham)
 
The idea that law and virtue, far from being antagonistic as modern philosophers sometimes suppose, are deeply interdependent is as old as the idea that ethics cannot get off the ground without politics. Virtue can only flourish where the right political provisions are made for it. Conveyed from the classical to the Islamic world through a number of textual routes, this idea would assume new forms as the focus shifted from the manmade law of the polis to the revealed law of God. In the work of Abū Ḥāmid al-Ghazālī, this shift sets the stage for foundational questions about the structure of value. Most simply, his attempt to integrate the virtues into the framework of the religious Law invites a question about evaluative primacy. Are certain character traits virtues—valuable and worth possessing—because they enable us to carry out the acts prescribed by the Law? Or on the contrary, are the acts prescribed by the Law valuable because they enable us to acquire certain character traits? It is the second view that receives the most direct support in al-Ghazālī’s major work, The Revival of the Religious Sciences, where al-Ghazālī takes the Aristotelian maxim “we become by doing” so deeply to heart as to make the value of actions derivative to their character-forming effect. The resulting account forms an important stage in the Islamization of Hellenistic ethics. It is an account not free from tensions; and it is also clear that the road travelled from the manmade laws of the polis to the divine Law has been a long one.

“Suhrawardī on Light Metaphysics”
By Tianyi Zhang (University of Cambridge)
 
Generally speaking, there are two popular approaches in Western scholarship to reconstructing Suhrawardī’s (d. 1191) Illuminationist philosophy: H. Corbin’s Oriental Theosophy approach, focusing on the mystical elements, and D. Gutas’s Illuminationist Avicennism approach, aiming to prove that Suhrawardī’s philosophy is essentially Avicennan. However, when it comes to Suhrawardī’s light metaphysics, both of these two approaches fail to reveal its philosophical significance. Although several scholars have pointed out the similarity between Suhrawardī’s light metaphysics and Mullā Ṣadrā’s (d. 1640) existential metaphysics, they also commit to the idea that Suhrawardī’s ontological position is the primacy of quiddity, as opposed to Mullā Ṣadrā’s primacy of existence. How can one get around this obvious contradiction? By following the Cave-Story approach I develop, I present an original interpretation of Suhrawardī’s light metaphysics, with a focus on interpreting the rich meaning of light. By looking at Book I of the second part of Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq, I first explain why light is an appropriate subject matter of metaphysics. I argue that Suhrawardī’s ontological position must be the primacy of existence, and light is, in fact, the most important sub-section of systematically ambiguous existence. This is followed by an analysis of Suhrawardī’s fourfold division of all things in the real world: immaterial lights, adventitious lights, dusky substances and states attributed to darkness. Lastly, I reconstruct Suhrawardī’s two-page argument for the existence of immaterial lights and another eight-page argument for the equivalence of immaterial lights to self-apprehenders. I conclude that Suhrawardī’s light metaphysics is a unique metaphysics about particulars rather than universals; it deserves serious philosophical study, and it must in no way be Avicennan.
 

"Ockham's Theory of Artifacts and Its Critics"
By Kamil Majcherek (University of Cambridge)

My main aim in this paper is to examine William of Ockham's theory of artifacts. According to a view commonly accepted by scholastic authors before Ockham, artifacts are distinct from natural things in virtue of an artificial-accidental form, produced by an artificer. In contrast, Ockham argues that artifacts are not really distinct from natural things, and that there is no need to posit artificial forms in order to account for the production and existence of artifacts, and that what suffices is only local motion of natural things and their integral parts. After presenting the scholastic background of Ockham's theory (the Aristotelian distinction between nature and art, and the distinction between different kinds of artifacts), I focus of Ockham's three main arguments for his parsimonious theory. I also present what I consider to be Ockham's conventionalism regarding the status of artifacts.
In the last part of the paper, I mention briefly some of the objections which were raised against Ockham's theory by later authors defending the realist theory of artifacts: Walter Burley, Nicole Oresme, and Paul of Venice, in whose view Ockham commits the same error regarding artifacts as some of the ancient materialists did with respect to natural things: so that instead of real generation, there is only spatial reconfiguration of pre-existent material components. I shall try to establish how far these and other criticisms of Ockham's theory are justified.

11:45 - 12:45  Barbara Bartocci (University of St Andrews)
“Should we, or should we not, trust Socrates? Theories of Paradox in Fourteenth-Century Logic”
 
 12:45 - 14:15     Lunch break
  
14:15 - 15:15 Lydia Schumacher (King’s College London)
“The Early Franciscan Doctrine of the Hypostatic Union: A Key Intervention in Medieval Debates about the Metaphysics of the Incarnation”
 
15:15 - 16:15 Brian Embry (University of Groningen)
“Carving the Beast of Reality. Francisco Suárez on Categorizing Modes and Other Substances”
 
16:15     Conference ends
 
* * *

ABSTRACTS:

“Should we, or should we not, trust Socrates? Theories of Paradox in Fourteenth-Century Logic”

By Barbara Bartocci (University of St Andrews)
 
If we suppose that Socrates utters ‘Socrates utters a falsehood’ and nothing else, should we trust Socrates or not? In my paper, I will briefly deal with 14th-century theories of paradox, with a special emphasis on Paul of Venice’s treatise on insolubilia, which is one of the main foci of the project “Theories of Paradox in Fourteenth-Century Logic: Edition and Translation of Key Texts”, led by Professor Stephen Read and financed by the Leverhulme Trust. One of the main aims of this project, indeed, is the publishing of a critical edition and English translation of Paul of Venice’s treatise on Insolubilia, which will be based on the 1499 Venice edition and on the only known manuscript preserving Paul’s text (Vat. Lat. 2132, ff. 236ra-245vb). In his Tractatus de insolubilibus, which closes his massive Logica Magna (written in the 1390s), in addition to his own view, Paul summarised and scrutinized 14 unattributed opinions about insolubles which were held by authors preceding or contemporary to him. Unfortunately, no modern editions of this work exist. Thus, scholars who want to read Paul’s text have to leaf through the folios of the early printed edition (1499). This, however, is not completely reliable, as will be shown by analysing some baffling passages in it. The establishment of a reliable text of Paul’s treatise will constitute a milestone for shedding more light on the medieval tradition of the insolubilia. Moreover, Paul’s taxonomy will be even more valuable when more of the work of the authors of the various opinions has been examined. This will be possible by studying authors who have not so far been taken into account by scholars. I will consider particularly the case of Blasius of Parma, specifically his treatment of the ‘Liar Paradox’ in comparison with Roger Swyneshed’s and in light of Paul’s list. 

“The Early Franciscan Doctrine of the Hypostatic Union: A Key Intervention in Medieval Debates about the Metaphysics of the Incarnation”
 
By Lydia Schumacher (King’s College London)
 
In the second half of the thirteenth century, Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus championed very different accounts of the hypostatic union, which have been closely associated with their respective intellectual legacies ever since. Scholars past and present have tended to treat these accounts as mutually exclusive alternatives, only one of which can claim to be doctrinally sound. My purpose in this paper is to demonstrate that both models of the hypostatic union prove plausible when interpreted in relation to their respective intellectual contexts. The key to offering this interpretation, I will argue, is the study of the treatise on the Incarnation in the Summa Halensis, a text that was collaboratively authored by first-generation Franciscan scholars between 1236-45/56—twenty years before Thomas Aquinas even set his hand to the task of composing his magisterial Summa Theologiae. This long-neglected Summa was the first to formulate the theory of the hypostatic union which is generally credited to Scotus, and it did so on the basis of metaphysical assumptions that differ quite significantly from the ones that prevailed at the time of Aquinas. For this reason, I will demonstrate, the study of this text in its context highlights particularly effectively the varying terms on which the Franciscan and Dominican accounts must be interpreted and the tenability of each account within its own frame of reference.

“Carving the Beast of Reality. Francisco Suárez on Categorizing Modes and Other Substances”

By Brian Embry (University of Groningen) 

​Medieval Aristotelians typically divide the world into substances and accidents. Descartes replaces Aristotelian accidents with modes, and he divides the world into substances and modes. But Descartes borrows the notion of a mode from his scholastic near-contemporaries. Francisco Suárez, for example, endorses a conception of modes very similar to Descartes’s. The presence of modes in an Aristotelian ontology raises a question about where to place them in the categories. Do modes constitute a new category of accident, next to the other nine? Do they fall under various categories of accident? Or should the substance/accident ontology be replaced entirely with a thing/mode ontology? The purpose of this paper is to explain the place of modes in Suárez’s division of the world into kinds. I first explain what Suárez thinks a category system is, and then I explain the rules according to which Suárez “carves the beast of reality.” What emerges is not only an answer to the question how to categorize modes, but also a detailed theory of the categorical structure of reality. 

***
​
11:30-13:00 William Simpson (University of Cambridge)
’What’s the matter? Power, entanglement and the dappled world’
 
Commentator: Daniel De Haan (University of Cambridge)
 
 
13:00-14:15 Lunch break
 
 
14:15-15:15 Giovanni Catapano (University of Padua)
‘Augustine on the existence of ideas of individuals’
 
 
15:15-16:15 Andreea-Maria Carrez (Université Paris-Sorbonne )
‘From immaterial essences to material cosmos: the case of planetary gods in Iamblichus's metaphysics’
 
 
16:15-16:45 Coffee/Tea break
 
 
16:45-17:45 Jonathan Morton (King’s College London)
'Why should philosophers care about allegory? The Romance of the Rose as philosophical poetry'
 
 
17:45 Conference ends
 
* * *

ABSTRACTS:

What's the matter? Power, entanglement and the dappled world.

By William Simpson 
 
In this paper I am seeking to provide an empirically adequate neo-Aristotelian ontology of powers that is compatible with quantum mechanics, whilst challenging two assumptions commonly held by contemporary philosophers.
 
In the first part of the discussion, I pose a 'problem of nonlocal powers', which is raised by quantum phenomena like superpositions and entanglement. I claim that this problem can be overcome by abandoning the assumption of *primitive physicalism*, which reifies physical properties like mass, spin and charge, and by adopting an ontology of power-atoms with primitive powers of motion, in which the wave function used to predict nonlocal phenomena is grounded in a global structural power. This structural power determines the motions of the power-atoms and is encoded within the network of ontological dependencies that exists between their primitive powers.
 
In the second part of this paper, I pose a 'problem of perceptual holism', which is raised by the holistic character of quantum physics.
By dissolving local connections between the perceptual beliefs of scientists and the behaviours of their measuring devices, quantum holism undermines any empirical reasons for believing that quantum mechanics describes reality. I suggest that this problem may be averted by abandoning the assumption of *physical fundamentalism* and upgrading the ontology to include a variety of local structural powers.
 
I consider some problems that arise for an ontology seeking to hold together both local and global structural powers, and suggest solutions that appeal to the nature of causal powers.

Augustine on the Existence of Ideas of Individuals

​By Giovanni Catapano 

Abstract: The Letter 14 to his friend Nebridius is the only place in all his writings where Augustine tackles the problem of the existence of ideas of individuals. In the divine Word, he argues, there is just one idea of the human being as such, but at the same time there are the ideas of many human individuals, insofar as these individuals are parts of a whole. Likewise, in the human mind there is one idea of the angle as such, but at the same time there are the ideas of the four angles that make up a square.

From immaterial essences to material cosmos:
the case of planetary gods in Iamblichus's metaphysics
 
By Andreea-Maria Carrez
 
Iamblichus, the head of the Neoplatonician school of Apamea, faces the questions of Porphyry about the divinity of planets as corporeal beings in his De Mysteriis. In opposition to the plotinian dualistic paradigm of matter and bodies as threats to the unity of the soul, Iamblichus (and Proclos after him) intends to rehabilitate the notion of corporeality in a way that would both assert immateriality's superiority over materiality and offer a relevant theory to theurgy. This dispute of the uttermost importance takes place in a critical philosophical, theological and historical context (the christianization of the IIIth and IVth centuries' Empire) to which Iamblichus responds with a concordist attitude, insisting on symphonia between all philosophical traditions and pagan cults. As a result, the questioning of the limits between the divine and the non-divine and the definition of their respective characteristics appear as a demanding task for « the savior of the entire Greek world », as Julian the Emperor called him. Facing Porphyry's interrogations and doubts, emphasizing what he considers as an internal contradiction, Iamblichus intends to demonstrate in his De Mysteriis that the concept of divine body is no oxymoron.
 
But how can the planets be gods, if gods are supposed to be strictly incorporeal? How does it affect Iamblichus's concept of divinity? Are celestial bodies actualized potencies, results of ousiai and noemata according to him? To what extent can they be both gods and living beings, if all divine beings are immortal, eternal, invisible and immune to corruption and pathos, and if bodies are necessarily bound to a beginning and an end, corruptible and visible? Do immaterial gods and the cosmos share the same nature according to Iamblichus? Are they considered as the One's germinative ennoiai, but if so, how can he avoid to identify the One with the Intellect? Does the gods' immateriality involve their transcendance of the material world, or are they considered to be immanent, which would suggest a monist turnover in Iambichus's thought? Can the influence of these planetary gods be both benevolent and malevolent, and if so, does it imply that evil would be part of divinity?
 
'Why should philosophers care about allegory?
The Romance of the Rose as philosophical poetry'
 
By Jonathan Morton 
 
The Romance of the Rose is one of the great literary monuments of thirteenth-century Europe. While its affinities to medieval philosophy, especially which of the University of Paris, have long been noted, that recently scholars have been paying closer attention to the specifics of the French poem's philosophy. But how can a work of allegory, by definition polysemous, be philosophical? Looking at the poem's style in relation to medieval dialectic and thinking about the intellectual context of the 1270s when Jean de Meun wrote his vast section of the Rose, this paper will suggest ways in which the work can convey meaning and consider the question of whether and how it makes sense to talk of poetry as philosophical.
 

Medieval Philosophy Network, 16th Meeting
14 July 2017
Cornwall Room | British Academy |10-11 Carlton House Terrace |SW1Y 5AH | London
 
  * * *
 
13:30 - 14:30 Giovanni Ventimiglia (University of Lucerne )
‘Aquinas on Being: two or three Senses of Being?’
 
14:30 - 15:00 Stephen Read (University of St Andrews)
Thomas Maloney's translation of Lambert of Auxerre's Logica (Notre Dame UP 2015) – a critical discussion.
 
15:00 – 15:30   Coffee break              
           
15:30 - 16:30 Anna Marmodoro (University of Oxford)
    ‘Plotinus on Perception’
 
16:30 - 17:00 John Marenbon (University of Cambridge)
Alain de Libera, L’Archéologie philosophique (Paris : Vrin, 2016) – a critical discussion.
 
17:00  Conference ends
 
 
* * *
​Abstract:

Aquinas on Being: Two or Three Senses of Being?
By Giovanni Ventimiglia (University of Lucerne)
 
Since the pioneering work by Peter Geach, Form and Existence (1955) it has become customary among some interpreters of Aquinas's writings (e.g. Anthony Kenny) or philosophers who refer to Aquinas in their own theories of existence (e.g. Barry Miller) to distinguish between two senses of being or existence: the "there is" sense and the "present actuality" sense. The first sense occurs in sentences such as "Elephants exist, but mermaids do not", where "exist" is a second order predicate. The second sense occurs in sentences such as "Elephants exist, but dinosaurs do not", where "exist" is interpreted as a first order predicate, which is a predicate of individuals.