The next Medieval Philosophy Network Meeting will take place at The Warburg Institute in London on Friday 13 March 2015. 


12:15-1:15pm                1st talk
Chris Martin (University of Auckland)
From Paris to Oxford and Back: Two Traditions in the Treatment of Propositionality, Negation and the Conditional in the Theory of Syncategoremata    

1:15pm-2:15pm             Lunch break

2.15pm-3:15pm            2nd talk
Marco Nievergelt (University of Lausanne)
Allegory and Epistemology: Roger Bacon and Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose

3.15pm-4:15pm            3rd talk
John Heil (Washington University in St Louis)
Accidents Unmoored

4.15pm-4:45pm            Coffee break

4:45pm-5:45pm            4th talk
Thomas Pink (King’s College London)
Suarez on canon law

 
Abstracts: 

From Paris to Oxford and Back: Two Traditions in the Treatment of Propositionality, Negation and the Conditional in the Theory of Syncategoremata

Chris Martin (Auckland University)

The first half of the twelfth century is one of the greatest periods in the history of logic and the centre of the logical world was Paris. Some years ago it was suggested that the ideas developed in Paris were transmitted by the beginning of the thirteenth century to Oxford where they were preserved while Parisian logicians developed the radical new theories of modism and speculative grammar. This thesis, dubbed by Sten Ebbesen OXYNAT, holds that the English tradition in the form developed by William of Ockham was eventually exported back to Paris and flowered there in the terminism of John Buridan. In this paper I will examine the treatment of propositionality, negation and the conditional in the treatises on syncategoremata written by William of Sherwood and Peter of Spain and show that we can indeed distinguish two distinct ways of treating these questions and that the ‘continental’ treatment found in Peter of Spain retains something of the highly sophisticated philosophical semantics of Peter Abaelard which is absent in the ‘English’ treatment of William of Sherwood.

Allegory and Epistemology: Roger Bacon and Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose

Marco Nievergelt (University of Lausanne)

Since the appearance of Gérard Paré’s studies in the 1940s, Jean de Meun’s familiarity with scholastic materials is widely accepted. The precise nature and deeper significance of Jean’s use of scholastic materials, however, remain to be understood. I propose a reading of the Roman de la Rose that highlights the importance of broadly epistemological concerns in the poem, arguing that such developments grow out of Jean’s engagement with a number of contemporary problems debated at the University of Paris and beyond. In particular I identify two broad areas of epistemological exploration: theories of cognition and sense perception, specifically the role of the sensible and intellectual species and the rise of perspectivist optics; and theories of signification, particularly concerning the status of metaphor and figurative speech. In both cases Roger Bacon’s often innovative and controversial theories appear to have served as major touchstones for Jean. But rather than seeing Bacon merely as one of the many ‘sources’ for the Roman de la Rose, I suggests that Jean’s allegorical poetics as a whole ultimately grow out of this deep, sustained engagement with Bacon. This has major implications for our understanding of the development of allegorical poetry and in the period 1270–1400, but also invites us to reconsider the philosophical texture of such literature, its relation with scholasticism more broadly, and the place of narrative allegory within an enlarged intellectual history of the later Middle Ages.

Accidents Unmoored

John Heil (Washington University in St Louis)

The paper begins with an avowal of the importance of the history of philosophy for philosophy. Attention then shifts to an interesting account of Abelard's conception of accidents advanced by Christopher Martin and John Marenbon, focusing on their comparison of Abelard's accidents with D. C. Williams's tropes. Reasons are given for thinking that the comparison is inapposite. The paper concludes with a plea for help on behalf of contemporary philosophers working in metaphysics.

Suarez on Canon Law

Thomas Pink (King’s College London)

Canon law is the humanly legislated positive law of the Church and, it seems, a parallel of civil law, the humanly legislated positive law of the State. How do the natures of Church and State involve similarities and differences between these two forms of human positive law? Canon law raised important questions about the relations between Church and State, and about the scope and function of positive law, both generally and for the special case of the Church. Suarez addressed these questions within the framework of a conception of positive law, both civil and canonical, as providing a mode of coercive instruction, and of the good of a community that positive law served as importantly determined by the beliefs of its members.

The next Medieval Philosophy Network Meeting will take place at The Warburg Institute in London on 14 November 2014. 

11:45am-12:45pm
Aileen Das (University of Warwick)
Bodies of Knowledge in the Arabic Middle Ages

12:45pm  Lunch

2.00pm-3:00pm  
Anna Marmodoro (University of Oxford)
Aquinas’ metaphysics of artefacts

3.00pm-4:00pm
Juhanna Toivanen (University of Jyväskylä)
Medieval Perspectives on Political Animality: Ants, Bees, Cranes and Humans

4.00pm-4:30pm  Coffee break

4:30pm-5:30pm   
Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco (University of Birmingham)
Legal Rule-Compliance Phenomenon Under the Lens of Anscombe’s Intention and Aquinas’s Philosophy of Action

5:30pm 
Conclusions

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.

The next meeting of the Medieval Philosophy Network in the UK will take place on the 15th of November, at the Warburg Institute in London. 

Program

12.30pm - Lunch

1.30pm - 1st talk
Dr György Gereby, Central European University (Budapest) - Duns Scotus on the Eternity of the World

2.30pm - 2nd talk
Dr Gabriele Galluzzo, University of Exeter - Aquinas’s Anti-Reductionist Mereology

3.30pm - 3rd talk
Dr Alexander D. Carruth, Durham University - How should we understand ‘eminent containment’?

4.30pm - Coffee break

5.00pm - 4th talk
Han Thomas Adriaenssen, University of Groningen - Peter Olivi on Conceptual Thought

6:00pm - Close


Please contact power@philosophy.ox.ac.uk if you wish to join in for lunch in a nearby informal restaurant (venue tbc) at 12:30 pm. Lunch is at one’s own expense.

All those wishing to have lunch should meet at the Warburg (outside or in the front hall if wet) at 12.25 and we shall go to the cafeteria restaurant just round the corner.

The next meeting will take place on Thursday 28th February, 12.00-16.00, at The Warburg Institute, London. 

Programme 

12.00 Tommaso Alpina (Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa): Intellection, Active Intellect and Intellectual Memory in Avicenna

This paper aims at providing a model of interpretation of the Avicennian doctrine of human intellection. The main problem about human intellection concerns the way in which Avicenna explains it in two famous chapters of his De anima, namely chapter II. 2, where a general account of his theory of abstraction is provided (taºrÍd), and chapter V. 5 where, in the case of the first acquisition of an intelligible form, the abstractive paradigm is combined with an emanatist view, in which the intervention of the Active Intellect (al-‘aql al-fa‘‘Ál) seems to play a decisive role. The claim I defend in this paper is that both abstraction and emanation, taken separately, are necessary but not sufficient conditions to explain how the human intellect acquires the intelligible forms. The examination of the particulars stored in the imagination by the human intellect triggers off the process of abstraction of the immaterial core from the particulars, then the light of the Active Intellect intervenes to guarantee the correctness of the process of abstraction and the universality of the forms abstracted. This role of guarantor which the Active Intellect plays at the epistemological level, is related to its role of collector of intelligible forms at the ontological level, since in chapter V. 6 Avicenna denies the possibility of intellectual memory. The human intellect has only a ‘procedural’[1] role: intellect, in other words, does not produce the contents of knowledge by itself, but combines or separates intelligible forms that are stored in the Active Intellect to which the human intellect itself ascends only when it is actually thinking them, so becoming ‘acquired intellect’ (‘aql mustafÁd).

12.40 Alisa Kunitz-Dick (University of Cambridge): ‘Omne namque quod est, aut est per aliquid aut per nihil’: Anselm’s Third Argument for God’s Existence in the Monologion, its Metaphysical Foundations, and its Immediate Historical Influence

This paper examines Anselm's third argument for the existence of God, located mainly in chapter three of the Monologion.  I argue that, although the soundness of the demonstration as a whole is questionable, the first division begins skilfully in an ontologically neutral manner, and, using a sophisticated argument concerning the definition of 'nothing', justifies and sets up Anselm's own theory of causation (per aliquid).  When this argument is considered historically, it does not appear to have been derived from any earlier sources or to have had any great influence, except that Richard of St Victor employed a poorly constructed variation of it.

13.20 Lunch Break

14.20 Sarah Hogarth (University of Western Ontario): Thomas Bradwardine’s Account of Future Contingents

In his treatise De futuris contingentibus (On future contingents), Thomas Bradwardine presents an interestingly original account of future contingents in opposition to that of William Ockham. The problem for both thinkers, of course, is how to go about reconciling God's foreknowledge with the real contingency of future events. According to Ockham's highly influential account, this is possible because although God has knowledge in the present of future contingent events, the fact that the subject matter of that knowledge is future and contingent makes the knowledge itself future and contingent in some special sense; thus, Ockham denies that the sort of inferences we may make about the necessity inhering in present events can in any way apply to God's present knowledge of things future, or in turn to the objects of that knowledge. Bradwardine is not satisfied with this solution, which he considers to be incompatible with divine immutability, and instead proposes a solution resting on the distinction between absolute and ordered (or ordained – ordinata) power. Bradwardine argues that God's knowledge of future events is enacted by his ordered power, and that relative to this power, the events of his knowledge are indeed necessary; however, this relative necessity says nothing of the events' absolute necessity. So Bradwardine employs Boethius' distinction between conditional and absolute necessity: but what makes his account markedly original and significant is the added distinction between God's absolute and ordered power. Somewhat surprisingly, Bradwardine's De futuris contingentibus has received almost no scholarly attention. In 1979, Jean-François Genest produced an edited text of the treatise; however, apart from Genest's introduction to the text, and a subsequent volume in which Bradwardine figures as a foil for discussion of Buckingham's philosophy, I can find no published treatment of this fascinating work. Before his death, Norman Kretzmann began translating  portions of Bradwardine's treatise into English (copies of this have circulated in unpublished form), but this project was never completed, and Kretzmann never wrote anything else on the topic. Calvin Normore has discussed Bradwardine's criticisms of Ockham's account as found in De causa Dei, but entirely neglects to mention the solution presented in Defuturis contingentibus.  What I therefore intend to achieve in this paper is a pioneering presentation of Bradwardine's account of future contingents, highlighting his criticism of Ockham and his divergence from other previous accounts.

15.10 John Marenbon (University of Cambridge): Why Leibniz misunderstood Abelard

Leibniz is well known for having claimed that God must create the best of all possible universes and then having to struggle, perhaps unsuccessfully, to avoid determinism. Over 500 years before, Peter Abelard put forward a very similar position and also argued, possibly more successfully than Leibniz, that it was compatible with there being contingency in the universe. Leibniz knew Abelard's argument and discusses it in his Theodicy. Yet he does not see Abelard as a precursor, but dismisses him as someone who is merely playing with words. My talk will discuss this strange misunderstanding. I shall explain what Abelard did in fact argue, and then show how Leibniz was led by the late medieval reception of Abelard's argument into misunderstanding his position.

16.00 Meeting ends – Tea will be available in the Warburg Institute common room

Our Autumn 2012 meeting will take place on Friday 9th November, 2.00-6.00 pm, at The Warburg Institute, London (directions to the Warburg here). 

Programme 

2.00  Riccardo Strobino - From Themistius to Al-Fārābī (and beyond): an excursus on Avicenna’s sources in his commentary on the Posterior Analytics
 
3.00  Stephen Clark - Gregory Palamas: Nominalist or NeoPlatonist?
 
4.00  Coffee break

4:30  Sydney Penner - On Polyadic Accidents

5:30 General discussion about the format of next meeting and the development of the group's website. 
 
6.00  End of meeting

Abstracts of each of the papers are given below. 

There will be an inexpensive light lunch available from 1.00. It is not necessary to register for this event and all are welcome. We should be grateful, however, if you could let us know whether you would like to have lunch, so that we can plan for the numbers (it will be simplest to ask you to pay at the time, in cash or by cheque). If you would like to do so, please contact Anna Marmodoro. 

Abstracts
 
Riccardo Strobino - From Themistius to Al-Fārābī (and beyond): an excursus on Avicenna’s sources in his commentary on the Posterior Analytics
 
I shall discuss the relationship between the two known Arabic translations of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics (by Abū Bishr Mattā and by an anonymous translator) and Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Burhān along with his debt to earlier Arabic sources (Al-Fārābī) and the ancient commentary tradition (Themistius and Philoponus). I shall also make some comments on the Renaissance Latin translations of Averroes’ Middle and Long Commentary on Aristotle’s work, as they are interestingly, albeit indirectly, related to the history of its transmission from Greek into Arabic, through the mediation of Hebrew.
 
Stephen Clark - Gregory Palamas: Nominalist or NeoPlatonist?
                                                                                                           
A preliminary discussion of an argument of Palamas (1296-1359) in 150 Chapters: Palamas here seems to argue that only particulars (only particular human beings, for example) have substantive, active existence, and that 'the universal "man"', as it 'does not think, does not hold opinions, does not see' (and so forth), entirely lacks 'actual subsistence' ($ 136). This would seem to be at odds with other orthodox propositions. I propose instead that his argument concludes that 'Man' is not an abstract universal, but is instead a substantial form, active in many individuals. In this he closely resembles the Muslim philosopher Ibn Arabi, though it is unlikely - judging from Palamas' own account of his Turkish captivity - that there was any real philosophical interaction between the two traditions of Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam. Both traditions have Neoplatonic roots.

Sydney Penner - On Polyadic Accidents

Medieval philosophers commonly assume that accidents cannot have more than one subject of inherence. Aquinas, for example, when he considers the view that a relation is like a road between the relata, dismisses the view on grounds that it is impossible 'because one accident is not in two subjects'. The claim is not obviously true and would face significant opposition were it presented to a group of contemporary analytic philosophers. So why was the claim so widely accepted by medieval philosophers? The claim, unfortunately, was used as a premise a great deal more often than defended as a conclusion, but in this talk I want to consider some reasons that might have led medieval philosophers to accept the claim.  

The first meeting took place on 7th June at The British Academy, London. The speakers were Sten Ebbesen, Cecilia Trifogli, and Peter Adamson, with book reviews by Riccardo Strobino, Anna Marmodoro, and John Marenbon.

Programme

1.30  Introduction:  Anna Marmodoro (Oxford) and John Marenbon (Cambridge)

1.35  Guest Speaker’s Address: Sten Ebbesen (Copenhagen):  The Aristotelian Tradition

(Discussion)

2.50  Tea/coffee break

3.15  Book Reviews: 

Riccardo Strobino (Cambridge/Bochum), Avicenna,  Deliverance: Logic, Translation and Notes by Asad Q. Ahmed, Introduction by Tony Street, Oxford 2011 (Studies in Islamic Philosophy); 

Anna Marmodoro; John Marenbon, Robert Pasnau, Metaphysical Themes 1274-167, Oxford 2011.

4.00   Cecilia Trifogli (Oxford): Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome on the Subject of Thinking and the Status of the Human Soul

Peter Adamson (KCL):  The Ethical Treatment of Animals in Islamic Philosophy 

5.15   Final remarks and plans for further meetings

5.30   Meeting ends