Abstract
Late ancient attempts to combine Aristotelian and Neoplatonic ideas of the mind continued among Arabic philosophers who were acquainted with ancient philosophy through numerous translations, including parts of Plotinus’ Enneads under the title The Theology of Aristotle. Through the twelfth-century translation of the sixth book of Avicenna’s Kitāb al-Shifā (The Book of Healing), Avicenna’s conception of the soul influenced twelfth- and early thirteenth-century Latin philosophy of mind, the second main source being Augustine. Both Augustine’s and Avicenna’s views of the soul belong to the Platonic tradition, and hence emphasise the independence of the soul from the body and its self-knowledge. Through a thought-experiment known as ‘the flying man’, Avicenna asks what knowledge humans without any sense experience would have. The answer is that they would know that they exist. Treating the soul as an immaterial substance, Avicenna explained that the Aristotelian formula of the soul as a form of the body is an expression of its function rather than its essence. Augustinian thinkers stressed the unity of a spiritual and immaterial soul as the centre of mental activities.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
John Buridan. (1513). Quaestiones super decem libros Ethicorum Aristotelis ad Nicomachum. Paris. Reprint Frankfurt an Main: Minerva 1968. Questions on book X of the ethics, translation in The Cambridge translations of medieval philosophical texts. Volume II: Ethics and political philosophy (pp. 498–586), eds. A. S. McGrade, J. Kilcullen, & M. Kempshall. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
Bazán, B. C. (1997). The human soul: Form and substance? Thomas Aquinas’ critique of ecclectic aristotelianism. Archives d’histoire doctrinale et littéraire du moyen âge, 64, 95–126.
Bazán, B. C. (2005). Radical aristotelianism in the faculties of arts. The case of Siger of Brabant. In L. Honnefelder et al. (Eds.), Albertus Magnus und die Anfänge der Aristoteles-Rezeption im lateinischen Mittelalter (pp. 585–629). Münster: Aschendorff.
Bricke, J. (1980). Hume’s philosophy of mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Carriero, J. (2009). Between two worlds: A reading of Descartes’s ‘Meditations’. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Casini, L. (2007). The Renaissance debate on the immortality of the soul: Pietro Pomponazzi and the plurality of substantial forms, in Bakker & Thijssen (Eds.), 127–150.
Dale, A. I. (1995). A history of inverse probability. From Thomas Bayes to Karl Pearson. New York: Springer.
Davidson, H. A. (1992). Alfarabi, Avicenna, and Averroes, on intellect. Their cosmologies, theories of the active intellect, and theories of human intellect. New York: Oxford University Press.
Della Rocca, M. (1996). Representation and the mind-body problem in Spinoza. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hasse, D. N. (2000). Avicenna’s De anima in the latin west. The formation of a peripatetic philosophy of the soul 1160–1300. London/Turin: The Warburg Institute/Aragno.
Hutton, S. (2007). Cambridge Platonists. The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu
Ivry, A. (2008b). Arabic and Islamic psychology and philosophy of mind. The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu
Jolley, N. (1999). Locke: His philosophical thought. New York: Oxford University Press.
Kärkkäinen, P., & Lagerlund, H. (2009). Philosophical psychology in 1500: Erfurt, Padua and Bologna, in Heinämaa & Reuter (Eds.), 27–45.
Kulstad, M., & Carlin, L. (2007). Leibniz’s philosophy of mind. The Stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu
Lagerlund, H. (2004). John Buridan and the problems of dualism in the early fourteenth century. Journal of the History of Philosophy, 42, 369–387.
Lagerlund, H. (2008). The unity of the soul and contrary appetites in medieval philosophy, in Lennon & Stainton (Eds.), 75–91.
Leijenhorst, C. (2002). The mechanisation of aristotelianism. The late Aristotelian setting of Thomas Hobbes’ natural philosophy (Medieval and early modern science 3). Leiden: Brill.
Libéra, A. de. (1994). Thomas d’Aquin. Contre Averroès antérieurs à 1270, text, translation and notes. Paris: GF-Flammarion.
Pasnau, R. (2002a). Thomas Aquinas on human nature. A philosophical study of Summa theologiæ Ia 75–89. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Pasnau, R. (Ed.). (2002b). The Cambridge translations of medieval philosophical texts, volume III: Mind and knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Rozemond, M. (1998). Descartes’s dualism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Silva, J. F. (2012). Robert Kilwardby on the human soul: Plurality of forms and censorship in the thirteenth century (Investigating medieval philosophy 3). Leiden: Brill.
South, J. B. (2012). Suárez, immortality, and the soul’s dependence on the body. In B. Hill & H. Lagerlund (Eds.), The philosophy of Francisco Suárez (pp. 121–136). New York: Oxford University Press.
Zupko, J. (2004). On Buridan’s alleged alexandrianism: Heterodoxy and natural philosophy in fourteenth-century Paris. Vivarium, 42, 43–57.
Zupko, J. (2007). John Buridan on the immateriality of the human intellect, in Lagerlund (Ed.), 129–217.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2014 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lagerlund, H. (2014). Medieval and Early Modern Theories. In: Knuuttila, S., Sihvola, J. (eds) Sourcebook for the History of the Philosophy of Mind. Studies in the History of Philosophy of Mind, vol 12. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6967-0_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-007-6967-0_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
Print ISBN: 978-94-007-6966-3
Online ISBN: 978-94-007-6967-0
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and LawPhilosophy and Religion (R0)