Medieval Philosophy Network, 23rd Meeting
20 November 2019
The Warburg Institute | University of London | School of Advanced Study | Woburn Square | London WC1H 0AB
PROGRAM
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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
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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.
