Dominik Perler

Sehen und begreifen : Wahrnehmungstheorien in der frühen Neuzeit

Dass wir durch Wahrnehmung einen Zugang zur materiellen Welt haben, scheint selbstverstandlich zu sein. Und dass die visuelle Wahrnehmung dabei einen prominenten Platz einnimmt, scheint ebenfalls selbstverstandlich zu sein. Doch was genau sehen wir: die Gegenstande selbst oder blos ihre wahrnehmbaren Eigenschaften? Wie gelingt es uns uberhaupt, etwas zu sehen? Konnen wir allein aufgrund von optischen und physiologischen Vorgangen etwas sehen, oder setzt das Sehen bereits Begriffe voraus, mithilfe derer wir etwas als etwas sehen konnen? Diese Fragen, die in der gegenwartigen Wahrnehmungs- und Erkenntnistheorie ausgiebig erortert werden, waren bereits in der Fruhen Neuzeit Gegenstand intensiver Debatten. In vielfacher Hinsicht legten die Diskussionen im 17. und 18. Jahrhundert sogar die Grundlage fur heutige Theorien, da sie zum einen die Probleme in aller Scharfe benannten, zum anderen aber auch Losungsstrategien vorlegten, die auch heute noch von Bedeutung sind. Der Band soll diese Debatten (von Descartes bis Reid) neu erschliesen und einem breiten philosophisch interessierten Publikum zuganglich machen. Es soll gezeigt werden, dass die Fruhe Neuzeit kein ehrwurdiges Museum der Philosophiegeschichte ist, sondern eine auserst produktive und anregende philosophische Epoche, die zu einem Dialog einladt.

Anneliese Maier and the Study of Medieval Philosophy Today

in 1936, at a time of rapid decline in German academia, the Prussian Academy of Science sent Anneliese Maier to rome, mandating her with a research project on leibniz letters in italian libraries. The young historian of philosophy, who had written her dissertation on kant’s theory of the categories, dutifully established a list with extant letters.1 But she did not become a leibniz scholar. nor did she continue her studies on kant. She delved into the unexplored world of italian manuscripts dealing with medieval philosophy and decided to spend her entire intellectual life in this world. leaving Germany for good, she settled in rome and worked in the Vatican libraries, reading and writing there until she died in 1971.2 She published a monumental five-volume study of late scholastic natural philosophy (Studien zur Naturphilosophie der Spätscholastik, 1949–58), an equally monumental three-volume collection of essays (Ausgehendes Mittelalter, 1964–67), and other articles, text editions, and manuscript catalogues.3 Despite her extraordinary achievements, she never obtained a regular professorial position in a German or italian university.4 Using Virginia Woolf’s famous words, one could say that she had no room of her own, at least no institutional room. What makes her work so remarkable? First of all, the choice of topics. At a time when neo-Thomism was thriving and many scholars were concerned with problems in Thomistic metaphysics, such as the relationship between essence books that shaped the historiography of philosophy

Gibt es Individuen

Abstract Does Spinoza accept finite individuals as really existing things? Or does he endorse the thesis that the substance is the only thing with real existence? This paper argues that his monism does not rule out the existence of individuals that have dependent, yet real existence. Spinoza defends a form of priority monism, taking the substance to be the foundation of all finite individuals, and thereby rejects existence monism. On his view, finite individuals are “power parts”: being founded in the substance, they have their active power from it. The paper argues for this thesis by analyzing Spinoza’s definition of parts. Moreover, it pays close attention to his functional individuation of parts that makes it possible to individuate different types of “power parts” at different levels.

Suárez on Consciousness

It seems quite natural that we have cognitive access not only to things around us, but also to our own acts of perceiving and thinking. How is this access possible? How is it related to the access we have to external things? And how certain is it? This paper discusses these questions by focusing on Francisco Suarez’s (1548-1617) theory, which gives an account of various forms of access to oneself and thereby presents an elaborate theory of consciousness. It argues that Suarez clearly distinguishes between first-order sensory consciousness (we have immediate access to our acts of perceiving because there is a special experience built into these acts) and second-order intellectual consciousness (we have access to our acts of thinking because we can produce reflexive acts directed at them). Moreover, Suarez attempts to explain the unity of consciousness by referring to a single soul with hierarchically ordered faculties that is responsible both for first-order and for second-order consciousness.

Partitioning the Soul : Debates from Plato to Leibniz

Does the soul have parts? What kind of parts? And how do all the parts make together a whole? Many ancient, medieval and early modern philosophers discussed these questions, thus providing a mereological analysis of the soul. The eleven chapters reconstruct and critically examine radically different theories. They make clear that the question of how a single soul can have an internal complexity was a crucial issue for many classical thinkers.

Spinoza über Tiere

Abstract: According to Spinoza, there is no categorical distinction between human and non-human animals: they all belong to the same nature and all consist of bodies with corresponding ideas. This thesis gives rise to two problems. How is it possible to distinguish different types of animals, in particular nonrational and rational ones, if all of them have the same metaphysical structure? And why does Spinoza nevertheless claim that human beings have a privileged status that gives them the right to use non-rational animals? This paper examines these two problems, arguing that the solution to both of them lies in Spinoza’s all-embracing naturalism.

Transformations of the Soul

Focusing on the period between Albertus Magnus and Descartes, the ten contributions examine various Aristotelian theories of the soul. They pay particular attention to the question of how the metaphysical status of the soul and its cognitive functions (sense perception, imagination, intellectual thinking) were explained.

Begriffliche und psychologische Ordnung bei Spinoza

Abstract Spinozas metaphysical thesis that there is only one substance in the universe but a plurality of modes, each of them falling under an attribute, raises a crucial question. How are modes of thinking, i.e. ideas, related to modes of extension? This paper intends to show that there are at least two answers, depending on an understanding of the equivocal term ‘idea’. If ideas are taken to be mental acts, they are identical with modes of extension. If, however, they are understood in the “objective” way, namely as the conceptual content of mental acts, they correspond to modes of extension. It is argued that this method of disambiguating the term ‘idea’ not only helps to understand Spinozas famous doctrine of parallelism but that it also provides a solution to two puzzling problems: the possibility of “active affects” and the existence of an eternal mind.

Ordnung und Unordnung in der Natur. Zum Problem der Kausalität bei Malebranche

Malebranches Occasionalismus scheint auf den ersten Blick eine Theorie der Kausalitat zu sein, die auf die Losung eines spezifisch Cartesischen Problems abzielt. Wenn Geist und Korper namlich zwei distinkte Substanzen sind, wie Descartes behauptet, und wenn sie sich durch unterschiedliche wesentliche Attribute (Denken und Ausdehnung) auszeichnen, aber trotzdem miteinander verbunden sind, stellt sich die Frage, wie sie uberhaupt interagieren konnen. Wie kann der Korper auf den Geist einwirken, um eine Sinneswahrnehmung hervorzurufen? Und wie kann umgekehrt der Geist auf den Korper einwirken, um eine Bewegung auszulosen? Genau von diesen Fragen scheint Malebranche auszugehen, wenn er provokativ feststellt, das Geist und Korper gar nicht aufeinander einwirken konnen. Uns scheint zwar, als bestehe eine Kausalrelation zwischen diesen beiden Substanzen, doch der Schein trugt. Gott allein ruft beim Vorliegen eines bestimmten korperlichen Zustandes eine Sinneswahrnehmung im Geist hervor, und er allein lost beim Vorliegen eines bestimmten geistigen Zustandes eine korperliche Bewegung aus. Korperliche und geistige Zustande sind lediglich „Gelegenheitsursachen“ (causes occasionnelles), d.h. Gelegenheiten fur das Handeln Gottes. Betrachtet man Malebranches Texte etwas naher, zeigt sich jedoch, das der Occasionalismus keineswegs blos einen Losungsversuch fur das Cartesische Interaktionsproblem darstellt1. Fur Malebranche ist nicht nur die