Mikko Yrjönsuuri

Obligations and Conditionals

The paper considers two kinds of medieval obligational disputations ( positio, rei veritas ) and the medieval genre of sophismata in relation to the kinds of inferences accepted in them. The main texts discussed are the anonymous Obligationes parisienses from the early 13th century and Richard Kilvington’s Sophismata from the early 14th century. Four different kinds of warranted transition from an antecedent to a consequent become apparent in the medieval discussions: (1) the strong logical validity of basic propositional logic, (2) analytic validity based on conceptual containment, (3) merely semantic impossibility of the antecedent being true without the consequent, and (4) intuitively true counterfactual conditionals. As these different kinds of consequences are spelled out by means of obligational disputations, it appears that the genre of obligations is indeed useful for the “knowledge of consequences,” as the anonymous Obligationes parisienses claims.

Introduction: The World as a Stereogram

This paper presents the historically most important theories of how visual perception is made spatial in the cognitive processing of the sensory input to the eye. All of them involve active engagement of the mind. Firstly, in the medieval theories physiological processes developed three-dimensional imagery in the brain, and active mental processing was needed to build coherence in the perceptual experience as a whole but not to yield the basic idea of spatiality. Secondly, according to Descartes, the eyes produced a unified two-dimensional visual image that was neurally transmitted to the inner surface of the brain. The innate conception of three-dimensional spatiality was superimposed intellectually on this image and thus all spatial perception involves mental judgment. Thirdly, Berkeley rejected innateness and claimed that the experiential three-dimensionality in vision was due to associating visual ideas to ideas of other senses, among which proprioceptive senses were the most important. Spatiality is thus not due to the basic visual experience itself in any of these three models.

Will in Early Modern Philosophy

Early modern philosophy inherited from the Middle Ages various very elaborate concepts of the will. It seems that little philosophical depth was added to the analyses of these concepts during this period. Rather, it is characteristic of the early modern discussions that traditional distinctions and theories were re-evaluated in new contexts, among which the mechanical approach to natural philosophy is of particular importance. Many philosophers were opposed to what was called ‘scholastic subtlety’, and defended instead very straightforward theories of the will.

Cartesian Psychology – Could There Be One?

The chapter examines what it would mean to talk about “psychology” in Descartes’ terms and argues that within the Cartesian framework we cannot really formulate the questions that are posed by contemporary psychologists. This results from the fact that psychological topics can be found on all three levels of Cartesian science: in metaphysics, in physics and finally in the applied sciences, such as medicine and morals. The aim is to show that the sensory and vegetative functions are often taken together by Descartes. Therefore, the Cartesian system does not recognize any principal difference between sensory functions, such as vision, and vegetative functions, such as digestion. Humans can be conscious of both functions being operative in their bodies, but neither function presupposes the existence of a soul. This interpretation emphasizes the importance of Descartes’ anatomical writings, including the manuscript Primae cogitations circa generationem animalium, which have been neglected by most contemporary commentators and scholars of Descartes.

Locating the Self Within the Soul – Thirteenth-Century Discussions

According to the traditional picture of the history of Western philosophy the High Middle Ages was intellectually Aristotelian, dominated by the Thomist approach. To some extent, this picture was formed already in the Early Modern Era, when many important thinkers distinguished their own philosophy from that of the scholastics. The university philosophy rejected by Descartes, for example, was indeed characteristically Aristotelian, and to a considerable extent even based on a thirteenth-century interpretation of Aristotle by Thomas Aquinas. It may be true that the scholastic philosophy, superseded in the seventeenth century by new approaches, was a direct extension of certain Classical trends. However, as a description of what really happened in thirteenth-century Western philosophy, simply categorising it as “unoriginal Aristotelianism” is clearly inappropriate. In fact, many of the crucial philosophical innovations typically associated with early modern thinkers were already established in the thirteenth century or at the latest in the beginning of the fourteenth century. We should not, thus, locate the borderline between Classical and Modern thinking at the Renaissance, as is often done. But it seems equally inappropriate to locate it at the fall of the Roman Empire, like Jonathan Swift did in his tale Battle of the Books. On the contrary, medieval philosophers were in deep debt to classical civilization. The dark centuries in the latter half of the first millennium did imply a significant break in Western European philosophical thinking, but it is nevertheless clear that the medieval schools were established on the basis of the literary heritage of Classical tradition, in the Latin community almost as directly as on the Arabic side. It was only little by little that the discussions in medieval universities were able to formulate from this material new kinds of philosophical thinking that could be called distinctively modern. The historical picture looks remarkably similar to this also in the case of the philosophy of the self. Medieval philosophers brewed modern thought from classical materials. The first full century of university life, the thirteenth century, initially saw a radical expansion in the knowledge and command of the ancient literary material, and then a radical re-evaluation of the deeper philosophical issues involved. The century began with an approach that can broadly be regarded as Platonist. The philosophy of self, in particular, was at first largely based on an Augustinian brand of the neoplatonic–stoic thinking, which was dominant in the