Edizioni FrancoAngeli - Last issue of RIVISTA DI STORIA DELLA FILOSOFIA (1/2013)

Introduzione

Sat, 15 Feb 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Mariateresa Fumagalli Beonio Brocchieri

Prefazione

Sat, 15 Feb 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Gianna Gigliotti

Lo sviluppo della dottrina platonica delle idee secondo la psicologia

Sat, 15 Feb 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Divine prescience and contingency in Boethius’s Consolation of philosophy

Sat, 15 Feb 2013 8:00:00 GMT

John Marenbon
This article discusses Boethius’s argument in Consolation V.3-6 that divine omniscience of even the future is compatible with some things happening contingently. Section 1 argues that, according to Boethius, the kernel of the problem is not that God’s beliefs about the future are true, but that they must be incapable of turning out false - something which seems incompatible with the unfixedness of contingent events. Section 2 looks at the Modes of Cognition Principle (everything that is cognized is cognized, not according to its own power, but rather according to the capacity of those who are cognizing), one of the building blocks of Boethius’s solution, and contends that it is far bolder than anything Boethius may have found in his sources, putting forward as it does a limited relativism about knowledge. Section 3 argues that the other important building block, the view that all things, past, present and future, are present to God, should be understood epistemically (he knows them as if they were in his present) rather than metaphysically (God’s present is co-extensive with worldly past, present and future).

Concursus accidentium. Contingenza, accidentalità o virtualità dei corpi nell’ontologia di Giovanni Eriugena?

Sat, 15 Feb 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Marta Cristiani
The notion of body is remarkably complex in the History of Philosophy. In the logical-ontological perspective of Book I of Periphyseon, John Scotus defines body as "a set of accidents" (concursus accidentium). This concept is close to the notion of "individual" in Porphyry, but the explicitly mentioned source of Periphyseon is De hominis opificio by Gregory of Nyssa, translated by John Scotus himself. This study examines in detail this complex Erigenian concept, both by identifying its links with contemporary debates on the nature of the Aristotelian categories and by setting parallels with contemporary texts (by Ratramnus of Corbie, Gotescalc, and Hincmar of Reims) on the corporeal nature of the soul and on its location, an issue already discussed by Gregory of Nyssa. According to Erigena, the spatiality of the soul is the logical limit which defines the soul’s created nature and excludes its corporeity. But how do we get the body from the non-corporeal essence and the logical categories? Following Gregory of Nyssa, Erigena distinguishes between categories that exclude materialization and those (quantitas, qualitas, situs, habitus) which, through something like a coitus mirabilis, finally reach the stage of corporeity.

La dottrina platonica delle idee e la matematica

Sat, 15 Feb 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Indice dei nomi

Sat, 15 Feb 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Libertà necessaria e libertà contingente in Anselmo d’Aosta

Sat, 15 Feb 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Massimo Parodi, Marco Rossini
In Anselm, the problem of the foundation and the possibility of sin is developed through a debate in which the problem of evil, its ontological reality and the problem of human freedom are closely connected. Following a thread that runs through three of Anselm’s works - De veritate, De libertate arbitrii and De casu diaboli - this essay discusses the relationship between evil and nothingness and the origin of sin and human freedom, understood on the one hand as consistent with the divine will and, on the other, as a disordered assertion of human autonomy. Then the authors direct their attention to the terms ‘naturaliter’ and ‘sponte’, which allow them to identify the two levels - necessity and contingence - on which Anselm studies the question of human freedom in depth. Their conclusion is that Anselm can be considered as representative of a particular Christian tradition that ultimately maintains the absolute and ungrounded nature of freedom.

"Natura non intendit nisi quinque digitos". Caso, contingenza e mostruosità nelle questiones supra octo libros physicorum e nei communia naturalium di Ruggero Bacone

Sat, 15 Feb 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Cecilia Panti
This study focuses on the development of Roger Bacon’s doctrine of accidental and monstrous events in two of his works: the early Questions on the Physics (c. 1245) and the later Communia naturalium (c. 1260-1270). It looks at the main sources of Bacon’s arguments, namely Aristotle’s doctrine on chance and luck (Physics II, 4-6) and its interpretation by Avicenna and Averroes, and the solution to the problem of chance proposed in two important commentaries to the Physics by Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. Like Bacon, Albert and Aquinas also use Averroes to point out the "impediments" to the natural course of events as a result of the inherent abundance or imperfection of matter. In addition, they all took from Avicenna the idea of a heavenly and universal natural agent, which makes it difficult to justify the very possibility of accidental events. Despite the apparent convergence of their solutions, Albert considers chance as something that, like nature, has an internal cause and, consequently, views the action of universal nature as a contributing cause of malice for anomalous generation. Bacon, on the contrary, deems the action of heaven to be a repairing virtue. In his Questions on the Physics this curative act of material imperfection is assigned to a "secondary intention" of universal nature. In Communia naturalium, written while Bacon was working out his original experimental and mathematical approach to the physical world, the new doctrine of irradiations of species allows him to reelaborate the very idea of heavenly action. Here, the entire universe is directed towards achieving human happiness, and the universal agent works even for deformed beings to make them as far as possible complete. This determines the very founding of a natural science able to include individuality and singularity as true objects of scientific knowledge in opposition to the Aristotelian idea, most closely adhered to by Albert and Aquinas, that science concerns universals.

Necessità e contingenza nella filosofia naturale di Tommaso d’Aquino

Sat, 15 Feb 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Pietro B. Rossi
Since the second half of the last century in particular, the natural philosophy of Thomas Aquinas and his conception of natural science have been the object of research within the context of a growing interest on the part of scholars in the history of medieval scientific thought. The purpose of this essay is to outline the fundamental nuclei of Aquinas’ position on the possibility of our having a scientific knowledge of the world and of natural events in the light of the latest studies. It attempts to highlight what the author thinks Aquinas’ point of view would have been. First the meaning of the words ‘nature’, ‘natural philosophy’ and ‘physics’ are analyzed and then his theological works and Aristotelian commentaries are looked at in chronological order.

Contingenza e impedibilità delle cause. Presupposti e implicazioni di un dibattito scolastico

Sat, 15 Feb 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Pasquale Porro
According to Avicenna, while the action of causes is always necessary, the production of effects may be considered in different ways. With respect to its cause, each effect is necessary, but may be contingent due to the interference of prohibitive impediments. In itself, and in an absolute sense, each effect is contingent. This article deals with the transformations of this model in the Latin Scholastic debate from the end of the 13th to the early decades of the 14th century, taking into consideration Thomas Aquinas, Siger of Brabant, John Duns Scotus and Francis of Marchia. The first defends a kind of ‘providential’ determinism, admitting only a relative, or secundum quid, contingency of sublunary effects with respect to the First Cause. The second, in explicit opposition to Aquinas, upholds the absolute contingency of the world in Avicenna’s sense. Interestingly enough, Siger’s position seems to be implicated in the condemnation of March 1277, not for being too deterministic but for rejecting an absolute ‘providential’ determinism. The last two both refuse to ground true contingency in impedible causes, appealing instead to freedom of will.

Mente divina e contingenza in Pietro Aureolo

Sat, 15 Feb 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Riccardo Fedriga
This paper addresses the problem of divine knowledge of individuals and future contingents in Peter Auriol’s "Scriptum" in I Sententiarum. It begins by reviewing the Divine’s attributes of Perfection and Immutability in Auriol’s theory of God’s ways of knowing. It then tries to explain the epistemic notion of the so-called "modes of cognition" (modi cognoscendi) in the light of a mental theory of paronymy (denominative). In this theory lies the solution to the problem of relating abstracted and temporal knowledge of God and to that of temporal cognition of individuals by the human intellect and imagination (phantasia). It is argued that cognition is, rather, a feature of the phantasia’s way of designating and placing things known in a mental space (res cognitae) and within a temporal succession of events. The analysis leads to establishing the existence of an analogous relationship between, on one side, non-discursive, abstract and indeterminate divine foreknowledge and, on the other, human cognitive abilities to understand, in a true or false way, propositions that refer to future contingents and events that occur in a determined time and space.

Spinoza e la contingenza

Sat, 15 Feb 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Vittorio Morfino
In this essay the author tries to show that Spinoza’s negation of contingency intended as indetermination does not prevent conceiving the contingency of the mode in an even more radical way than that attributed to him by Leibniz in Ad Ethicam. Namely, the mode is not only that whose essence does not involve existence but also that whose essence itself depends on God’s immanent causality.

Leibniz e i futuri contingenti

Sat, 15 Feb 2013 8:00:00 GMT

Massimo Mugnai
Leibniz discusses the theme of future contingents on the basis of a theory of possible worlds centered on the notion of complete concept and on the idea that a proposition (of the subject-predicate form) is true when the concept corresponding to the predicate is "contained" among the conceptual notes that make up the concept of the subject. This idea of truth as "containment", wedded to the assumption of the so-called principle of sufficient reason (everything that happens has a reason for its happening), raises the problem of how to justify contingency in a world of individual substances which are fully described by a series of compossible complete concepts. Leibniz’s metaphysics of possible worlds, however, has the effect of simplifying the problem of future contingents as it was discussed at the time, making unnecessary the recourse to socalled middle knowledge (scientia media).

Indice dei nomi

Sat, 15 Feb 2013 8:00:00 GMT