Theories of Cognition from Thomas Aquinas to Descartes - AFS500205
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How do we have an idea of the world? How our minds grasp reality? The aim of this course is to study the answers given by medieval philosophers. At the end of the course, we will try to understand what impact they had on early modern philosophy. The texts that we are going to examine belong to different literary genres: from the “Summae” (Thomas Aquinas, Ockham) and the commentaries to Peter Lombard’s Sentences (Duns Scotus, Bonaventure, Peter John Olivi) to those on Aristotle’s De anima; they belong to the production by thinkers who were, all, theologians. We will thus focus on a medieval scholastic perspective, and, at the end of the course, on its late heritage (Francisco Suárez, Descartes), trying to figure out what impact those medieval cognitive models projected on early modern philosophy.
The guideline of our texts’ reading will be the doctrine of the intelligible species. Such doctrine, elaborated by the theologians of the 13th century to bridge the gap between material and spiritual domain, arrives to Descartes’ day. At the end of the course, the student will be able to: - gain a general knowledge of some of the main topics of medieval theories of cognition, placing the texts taken into consideration within their proper historical and intellectual context; - accurately analyze a medieval text, as well as critically read and compare the secondary literature on that matter; - show the understanding of the text in an oral presentation and a class discussion; - measure the long-term influence of medieval theories of cognition and establishing parallelisms between the presented authors - using a late scholastic text as an encyclopaedia and a work instrument. Last update: Tropia Anna, Ph.D. (27.09.2018)
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