Our Summer 2014 meeting will take place on Friday 30th May, at The Warburg Institute, Woburn Square, London WC1H 0AB (travel directions here).     

Programme

12:00—13:00 Chris Martin (Auckland): ‘The Grammar and Logic of Number and Unity at the Beginning of the Twelfth Century’

13:00—14:00 Lunch [Participants who wish to might lunch together at the RADA cafe just by the Warburg Institute (Malet Street). We shall gather outside the Warburg Institute at 13:00 to go to the restaurant.] 
 
14:00—15:00 Robert Pasnau (Colorado): ‘When Did Ideas Become Objects of Perception?’

15:00—16:00 Tianyue Wu (Peking): ‘Augustine on the Election of Jacob: A Philosophical Defence of Divine Predestination against the Manipulation Argument’

16:00—16:30 Coffee

16:30—17:30 Giorgio Pini (Fordham): ‘Non-mutual Relations in Duns Scotus’


Abstracts

Chris Martin, ‘The Grammar and Logic of Number and Unity at the Beginning of the Twelfth Century’: Peter Abaelard is only the most famous of many masters active in Paris at the beginning of the twelfth century. A central problem for these masters was to reconcile the apparently competing claims of Aristotle and Priscian in order to construct philosophical grammars on which to ground their metaphysical theories. In this paper I will make a start on trying to untangle the competing positions which were developed to account in particular for the grammatical, logical, and metaphysical properties of unity and number. It is these positions which Abaelard refers to and criticises in developing his own philosophical logic and only when we understand them will we be properly able to properly assess the originality of his work.

Robert Pasnau, ‘When Did Ideas Become Objects of Perception?’: Somewhere in the middle of the seventeenth century, philosophers began to characterize ideas as the immediate objects of perception. Looking carefully at the medieval background, I consider the ways in which this notorious doctrine is, and is not, something new, and I propose some reasons for why philosophers started talking this way.

Tianyue Wu, ‘Augustine on the Election of Jacob: A Philosophical Defence of Divine Predestination against the Manipulation Argument’: By reconstructing Augustine’s insights into the relationship between divine action and human freedom, this essay aims to explain how divine predestination can be philosophically compatible with our moral intuitions today. It will focus on the election of Jacob to show Augustine’s position in his later works and offer a preliminary defence by appealing to a Frankfurt-style case. Then it will examine the sharp criticisms of Frankfurt-style cases from contemporary incompatibilists by Manipulation Argument. This critical examination will reveal a significant find in Augustine’s doctrine of predestination, i.e., the asymmetric structure of moral responsibility, which will help us respond to the criticisms from Manipulation Argument and liberate the debate on free will from the dialectical stalemate.


Giorgio Pini, ‘Non-mutual Relations in Duns Scotus’: Relations are typically mutual: if Mary is taller than Paul, Paul is lower than Mary. So-called “non-mutual relations” are such that no corresponding co-relation holds between what a relation is directed at and its foundation. One of Aristotle’s examples of non-mutual relations is the relation holding between knowledge and what is known: his contention is that there is a relation between knowledge and what is known but no corresponding co-relation between what is known and knowledge.  In this paper, I will present the main aspects of Scotus’s treatment of non-mutual relations and consider the central role they play in some of his most characteristic metaphysical views.

Our next meeting will take place on the 28th February 2014 at The Warburg Institute, 2.30 until 6.00pm, meeting for lunch beforehand for those who wish. 

2:30-3:30pm   Alfonso Ganem (National University in Mexico City (UNAM)  - ‘Al-Farabi on Foreknowledge and Contingency’

3:30-4:30pm   Stephen Read (St Andrews) – ‘Curry paradoxes in medieval logic'

4:30-5:00pm   Coffee break

5:00-6:00pm   Sonja Schierbaum (Hamburg) – ‘Ockham and Chatton on demonstratives and (definite) descriptions’


Abstracts 

Alfonso Ganem – ‘Al-Farabi on Foreknowledge and Contingency’

The tensions between determinism and free will in the Medieval Arabic tradition were common within the main theological schools, namely, Mu'tazilites and Ash'arites. The major debate between these schools is focused on the causal nature of agents and the degree of responsibility that can be attributed to their actions. The Mu'tazilites held a non-deterministic position according to which human beings are the agents of their own actions and can be responsible for their practical consequences. On the other hand, the Ash'arites recognized God as the unique agent of every event in the world and, hence, human actions were considered as secondary causes determined by Divine Will. The presence of Aristotelian, Neoplatonic and Stoic philosophy in the Arabic context introduced new conceptual and methodological tools that modified the standard interpretation of the debate and allowed the formulation of new solutions. The influence of ancient discussions on the different conceptions of causality and agency, providence, and the distinction between different kinds of necessity and possibility, allowed the development of a set of arguments different from the ones sustained by the theological schools. Arabic philosophers knew several versions of the conflict between determinism and free will coming from the Greek tradition, from deterministic positions such as that of the Stoics, to compatibilist positions such as that of the Peripatetics. Al-Farabi's approach to this difficulty introduces relevant nuances. The aim of this paper is precisely to reconstruct and analyze Al-Farabi's compatibilist argument as is presented in the second section of his Long Commentary on Peri Hermeneias. There, Al-Farabi argues for the compatibility between the epistemic access of the First Cause to future events and the contingent nature of sublunary events. The argument can be presented as a dilemma: the first horn sustains that the actions of sub-lunar substances cannot be determined because of a “principle of contingency" that characterizes their nature; the second horn defends the epistemic privilege of a God whose omnipotence let him know everything that exists in reality without any deficiency or indeterminacy. The first horn is grounded in a reductio ab absurdum that proves the existence of a principle of contingency in all material substances, implying an indeterminate “truth value" of any proposition about the future that refers to particular individuals. Therefore, the “truth value" of propositions with particular quantifiers and future operators cannot be determined by any logical method or be known by any epistemic agent. The second horn depends on an emanationist model that would allow for epistemic access to the complete set of propositions. The Long Commentary on Peri Hermeneias does not provide a clear description on the mode the First Cause intellects the world or the propositions, but we can use some of the arguments of the Perfect State to complete the vision of Al-Farabi's argument. The answer to the dilemma will be a logical solution that harmonizes divine fore-knowledge with the principle of contingency. Intellection of the determinate truth value of propositions does not imply the necessary elimination of contingency in natural facts, because the material modality of possibility in propositions is not affected by divine intellection. Therefore if God knows that “Zaid will travel tomorrow" or that “there will be a sea battle tomorrow", the principle of contingency can be preserved because the material aspects that compose the fact are in themselves indeterminate, while divine knowledge intellects the causal relation between propositions that makes it possible to know the fact determinately at a propositional level. In the paper, I reconstruct Al-Farabi's attempt to harmonize divine knowledge and the contingency of sub-lunar substances.

Stephen Read – ‘Curry paradoxes in medieval logic'

Recent work on the semantic paradoxes has focussed on V-Curry, a validity version of Curry's paradox, originally a set-theoretic paradox, due to Haskell B. Curry. Variants on this paradox were known to fourteenth-century logicians, who proposed their own solutions. Thomas Bradwardine's solution depends on the idea that every sentence signifies many things, and a sentence's truth depends on things' being wholly as it signifies. This definition of truth involves a rethinking of the T-scheme or truth-equivalence attributed to Alfred Tarski. Bradwardine's solution is underpinned by a novel theory of meaning, based on his claim that a sentence signifies everything that follows from it. The upshot is that solving the Curry and other semantic paradoxes does not require revision of logic, thus saving logic from paradox.

Sonja Schierbaum – ‘Ockham and Chatton on demonstratives and (definite) descriptions’

Walter Chatton is commonly considered as one of William Ockham’s earliest and most vehement critics. For instance, Chatton criticizes and finally rejects Ockham’s well known conception of intuition as a kind of intellectual perception of particulars (this dog, this blue spot). In this paper I want to discuss some implications of either embracing or rejecting intuition for the conception of our ways of thinking about particulars. I argue that Ockham denies that one can think about a particular only by means of some description. The point is that in his view knowing a thing a by intuition does not imply knowing a to be the referent of any description. Rather, knowing a by intuition implies merely the possibility of demonstrative identification. By contrast, it (partly) follows from Chatton’s rejection of intuition that according to him thinking about a particular always involves some description, even in case of demonstrative identification. The aim is to give a general assessment of the plausibility of these two positions regarding the “descriptive” and “non-descriptive” ways of thinking about particulars.