John Mair (1467–1550) was an influential post-medieval scholar. This paper focuses on his Tractatus insolubilium, in which he proposed semantic analysis of self-referential phenomena, in particular on his solution to alethic and correspondence paradoxes and his treatment of their general semantic aspects as well as particular applications. His solution to paradoxes is based on the so-called “network evaluation”, i.e. on a semantics which defines the concepts of truth and correspondence with reality in contextual terms. Consequently, the relation between semantic valuation, synonymy and contradiction must be redefined.

The paper attempts to interpret P. van Inwagen’s refutation of Evans’ argument that there cannot be vague objects and defend it against the charge of inconsistency raised by Radim Bělohrad. However, such an interpretation is not without a cost. Therefore another interpretation of van Inwagen’s example of the Cabinet is offered which evades Evans’ charge of inconsistency against indeterminate identity as it does not need the notion at all.

In this article I discuss several apparent counterexamples to the asymmetry of ontological dependence. These counterexamples were introduced in discussions about grounding, but they can affect every theory of ontological dependence. I show that, if one adopts metaontological pluralism (i.e., the view according to which there are many dependence relations), one has some advantages when it comes to defending the asymmetry of dependence. In Section 1, I introduce metaontological pluralism and my own version of it, which is based on Respect-of-Dependence Relations (rd-relations). I then single out five strategies to deal with apparent cases of symmetric dependence and show that two of them are only available to metaontological pluralists. In Sections 2, 3, and 4 I deal with cases of symmetric dependence by adopting these strategies. Finally, in Section 5, I anticipate and reply to three objections against my account.

One of the prominent debates of post-Tridentine scholasticism addressed probability, often expressed by the term “moral” (or adverbially, “morally”), originally motivated by the epistemology of decision-making and the debates on predestination and “middle knowledge”. Puente (or Pedro) Hurtado de Mendoza (1578–1641), an Iberian Jesuit and the author of one of the earliest Jesuit philosophy courses, entered this debate in the early-seventeenth century. This paper presents his 1610s and 1620s analyses of different forms or degrees of evidence, certainty, and necessity or impossibility, addressing the commonly-used trichotomy of the “metaphysical”, “physical”, and “moral”, in which “moral” is the weakest form of a modality, together with the paradigmatic examples and interesting applications of the framework.

In his Commentary on Aristotle’s De Anima, Francisco Suárez offers a rich account of the psychology and physiology of laughter. Among other claims, he asserts that laughter is a voluntary act, without giving any further explanation. The aim of this paper is to glean from his texts a philosophically compelling argument for this claim. I will claim that for Suárez laughter is a commanded act of the will, since it somehow needs the will’s consent to be elicited. This kind of voluntariness is enough to make laughter morally relevant.

During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, one of the most controversial intellectual disputes was the question of method in natural philosophy, or physics. The tensions between observational experience and geometrization, demonstration from the effects (demonstratio quia, a posteriori) and from the causes (demonstratio propter quid, a priori), and between Aristotle’s authority and new philosophical tendencies made some philosophers search for new solutions. Others criticized these new solutions and tried to show the validity of several medieval scholastic readings of Aristotle. With this article, I intend to present the role of experience in the dispute between Nicoletto Vernia’s approach to the subject-matter of physics and Gomes of Lisbon’s response to it. While Vernia holds that the subject-matter of physics is mobile body, Gomes argues it is natural substance. What is at stake is how to combine experience, definition, and demonstration to obtain a consistent scientific method. Only through the study of this kind of text and discussion can we gather a solid background to elucidate what has changed and what has been inherited from the past in the scientific shift of the seventeenth century.

What does ‘being dead’ mean? Should we understand ‘being dead’ as a real property or state of a subject or as something different? Does the study of death belong to metaphysics or philosophy of nature? Does the meaning of ‘being dead’ change when referred to a corpse or to a separated soul? What kind of negation does it entail? The present paper discusses these and related questions concerning the meaning of death. To do so, the paper assesses the contemporary debate concerning the so-called “termination thesis” and provides a metaphysical argument against non-terminism.

The subject of this essay is propria and their relation to essence. Propria, roughly characterized, are those real properties of a thing which are natural but nonessential to it, and which are said to “flow from” the thing’s essence, where this “flows from” relation is understood to designate a kind of explanatory relation. For example, it is said that Socrates’s risibility flows from his essential humanity; and it is said that salt’s solubility in water flows from the essential natures of both salt and water. The question I raise and attempt to answer in this essay is: In what sense do propria “flow from” essences? What kind of explanatory relation is this exactly? Some suggest that it is a relation of logical consequence (e.g., Kit Fine); others, of grounding (e.g., Michael Gorman); and still others, of formal causation (e.g., David Oderberg). In this essay, I reintroduce and defend a view suggested by the late scholastic Spanish philosopher and theologian Francisco Suárez, who in 1597 wrote that effluence is best understood as a very special kind of efficient causation, which we can call the relation of emanation. The thesis of this essay, then, is that propria emanate from essences. Along the way, this paper offers a new taxonomy of types of propria; it explains the significance of propria for the metaphysics and epistemology of essences; it discusses at length varieties of efficient causation (and emanation in particular); and then it offers an extensive abductive argument in favor of Suárez’s account, whereby the former accounts of effluence are critiqued, each in turn, and Suárez’s view is motivated and ultimately shown to be superior to its competitors.

The paper focuses on MacIntyre’s account of teleology and the role of teleology in explaining value language and grounding ethical normativity. It isolates three distinct albeit interrelated notions of teleology emerging gradually from Macintyre’s philosophical project. It investigates how moral language is explained and moral norms justified on the bases of these three articulations of the teleological motif. It subjects the weakness of this reasoning to criticism.

Fourteenth-century logic gave rise, among others, to the genre De scire et dubitare, which offered a unified framework for discussing different forms of epistemic sophisms by utilising the underlying systems of epistemic logic. One of the problems introduced in this context already by the founding father of this genre, William Heytesbury, was the so-called axiom of positive introspection, i.e., the principle that an agent who knows that something is the case, knows that she knows that it is the case. Owing to Heytesbury’s enormous popularity in the subsequent centuries, discussion of this problem became relatively widespread. This debate was addressed already in Boh’s seminal Epistemic Logic in the Later Middle Ages, which, despite its limitations acknowledged by its author, is a standard source. The present study elaborates on Boh by extending the corpus of his works (both in the sense of including new authors and of utilising manuscripts along with printed editions) and drawing new connections based on that. The core of the survey consists of an analysis of the positions of William Heytesbury and John Wyclif (both pertaining to the context of Merton College), their Italian reception by Peter of Mantua, and the “continental” reception of Heytesbury by John of Holland. The main goals of this study are to formalise the key arguments, which makes it possible to address the underlying systems of epistemic logic and their respective “strength”, and to articulate the conceptual background of those arguments and systems (the concepts of evidence, attention, and order of cognitive operations). The gist of the debate is, on one of the sides, an attempt to prove that it is impossible to doubt whether one knows that something is the case by employing whether the principles of positive introspection and of distribution of knowledge over implication, or the principles of positive and negative introspection combined.

Further development of the research on the fourteenth-century logic of iterated modalities (Heytesbury, Wyclif, and Peter of Mantua) leads to further exploration in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italian scholasticism, in particular, the contributions of Paul of Venice and his followers (including Paul of Pergula, Cajetan of Thiene, and Domenico Bianchelli). The research confirms the well-established notion of “British logic in Italy”, as the major logical strategies used in the analysed works can be traced back to earlier British authors. Logically speaking, the problem of iterated epistemic modalities (such as knowledge and doubt) was framed as debate on the consistency of the hypothesis that an agent doubts whether she knows φ and the hypothesis that an agent knows φ and doubts whether she knows φ, in which the principles of positive and negative introspection play a major part. Philosophically speaking, the debate on the possibility of doubting one’s own knowledge utilised theories of evidence and scientific proof and philosophy of the mind (including the problems of direct and reflexive mental acts and of propositional attitudes).

The problem of logical omniscience breaks down to the problems of the closure of knowledge under implication and of the distribution of knowledge over implication. In late medieval scholasticism these two related issues were engaged in various genres, in particular in general analysis of validity, games of obligationes, solution to self-referential antinomies and semantics of terms. The present study analyses the corpus of fourteenth-century texts with some overreaches to the subsequent two centuries, attempting to cover representatives of both the “British” and the “Continental” tradition. With some degree of simplification, this results in a range of four basic positions: 1. knowledge is closed under “analytic entailment” (Buridan), 2. knowledge distributes over implication (Heytesbury), 3. knowledge distributes over implication provided that its consequent’s truth is being taken into consideration (Peter of Mantua), 4. knowledge does not distribute overimplication (Wyclif).

I discuss the views on logic held by three early Nordic neo-Aristotelians — the Swedes Johannes Canuti Lenaeus (1573–1669) and Johannes Rudbeckius (1581–1646), and the Dane Caspar Bartholin (1585–1629). They all studied in Wittenberg (enrolled respectively in 1597, 1601, and 1604) and were exponents of protestant (Lutheran) scholasticism. The works I utilize are Janitores logici bini (1607) and Enchiridion logicum (1608) by Bartholin; Logica (1625) and Controversiae logices (1629) by Rudbeckius; and Logica peripatetica (1633) by Lenaeus. Rudbeckius’s and Lenaeus’s books were published much later than they were prepared. Rudbeckius wrote the first versions of his books in 1606, and the material for Lenaeus’s book had been prepared by 1607. Bartholin calls the treatment of the nature of logic the “first doorkeeper of logic”. To compare the views of the three neo-Aristotelians on this topic, I systematically investigate what they have to say about second notions, the subject of logic, the internal and external goal of logic, and the definition of logic. I also compare their approaches with those of Jacob Martini (teacher of Rudbeckius and Bartholin) and Iacopo Zabarella (an intellectual predecessor of all three).

Puente Hurtado de Mendoza (1578–1641), Iberian Jesuit and author of one of the earliest comprehensive Baroque philosophy courses, entered the debate on the modality “moral” or “morally” in the sense of a qualifier of evidence, certainty, being, and necessity or impossibility in the first half of the seventeenth century. This paper presents his analysis of the different forms (or levels) of evidence and necessity or impossibility in 1630s, where “moral” represents the weakest degree of these properties. First, it covers the notion of moral evidence in the sense of a wise decision that is in accordance with the consensus of either the majority of mankind or of the learned community, as introduced in Disputationes de Deo. Second, it covers the notions of moral necessity and impossibility, introduced in De Deo homine in terms of a strong inclination, and developed in Hurtado’s later theological texts. Third, Hurtado introduced the notion “morally” in his De actibus humanis in frequentist terms.

John Duns Scotus’s famous doctrine of the formal distinction has a twofold justification: a theological one, stemming from the necessity to express coherently the Christian doctrine of the Holy Trinity, and a metaphysical one, according to which formal distinction is a necessary condition of the abstraction of universal (objective) concepts from individuals. This paper is a detailed analysis of this latter argument, presented by Scotus in Questions on Metaphysics VII, q. 19. Scotus apparently demolishes the alternative theory of intentional distinction proposed by Henry of Ghent, but not without first attempting to defend it in as refined and powerful form as possible. Given that Henry’s notion of intentional distinction is substantially the same as later Thomits’s “distinctio rationis ratiocinatae”, this rises questions about the validity about the latter notion, both in the context of Scotism (such as in the thought of Bartolomeo Mastri) and in genereal.

Who owns the girl’s body, the parents, or the daughter herself? In Catholic casuistry, this issue has not only been occasionally touched upon, it has been topical among the commentators on Aquinas (STh II-II, q. 154, a. 6) from the 16th up to the 18th centuries. Nevertheless, modern scholarship ignores this big dispute. The distortion of early modern history in consequence thereof precludes a fair appraisal of the achievements of the Christian schools within the Habsburgian commonwealth. Whereas the Iberian Peninsula was the theatre of the endeavour here described (Domingo de Soto OP, Luis de Molina SJ, Gabriel Vázquez SJ, Juan de Lugo SJ, the Salmantine Carmelites), Jansenist France was forward in defeating it. The quarrel about this issue gains an additional interest by the observation that it represents the rare case where the schoolmen themselves had the keen feeling that the stand they took represented a divide between two ages, medieval and modern, viz. Pre-Tridentine and Post-Tridentine. The main purpose of the present paper, then, is to render a necessary piece of apologetics. Its focus is on the deplorable situation in which we presently are due to the rotten feminist convictions about how things went.

The purpose of this article is to compare the Thomist and the Scotist theory of relations. The main feature of the Thomist theory is an effort to minimize the ontological import of the specific essential ratio of relation as such, called esse ad, and to reduce the ontological import of its other aspect, the esse in or inherence understood as a common feature of all accidents, to the esse in of its foundation. The Scotists, on the other hand, have no tendency to deflate the esse ad of a relation. Moreover, according to Malafossa of Barge’s theory (adopted by B. Mastri and B. Belluto), a relation involves two different instances of esse in. The one, called esse in velut in subiecto, is that generic inherence common to all accidents (which, therefore, does not occur in the substantial relations of divine persons). The other, esse in velut in fundamento, belongs specifically to relation as such and reflects the fact that very relation, even a substantial one, is not only a relation towards something, but necessarily also a relation of something towards something else. In spite of the fact, therefore, that the Thomist and Scotist doctrines are usually grouped together as mere subvariants of anti-reductive realism, they must be regarded as substantially different.

Poznámka překladatele - Čtenář si nepochybně klade otázku po původu a historickém kontextu nově objeveného sókratovského dialogu, jehož český překlad zde prezentujeme. Tomuto oprávněnému požadavku však bohužel zatím nelze dostát. Autorství a historická povaha textu jsou stále předmětem zkoumání a zásadní nejistota zatím panuje i ohledně zcela základních otázek. Prezentovat zde jakékoliv předběžné dohady by tudíž za této situace mohlo být velmi zavádějící; čekat s prezentací dialogu veřejnosti na vyřešení techto otázek se však zdálo škoda. Proto jsem se rozhodl – po poradě s redakcí časopisu – zdržet se prozatím všech vyjádření k historickým a textově kritickým otázkám spjatým s textem a předložit jej tímto způsobem v pracovním českém překladu bez jakéhokoliv dalšího komentáře. Překlad věnuji svým kolegům. - Lukáš Novák

The author shows that Aquinas’s treatise on the Trinity can be viewed in two ways. According to the first, now prevailing opinion, the thoughts of the Angelic Doctor are too speculative and in essence they harm our personal relationship with God. He aims to show that the main source of inspiration for this approach are those currents in modern and contemporary philosophy according to which any metaphysics is impossible. Adherents of the other view do not reject metaphysics, and so they are also sympathetic towards Aquinas’s connecting speculation with the Trinity doctrine. They see a great advantage in this connexion, as it allows us to understand more deeply the mysteries of faith and so to demonstrate the uniqueness of the Christian message. The author aims to show that both approaches are justified and one should not be sacrificed for the other. He believes that a philosophical framework allowing the old and the new Trinitarian theologies to coexist is provided by Wittgenstein’s conception of speech games.

In our contribution we continue our discussion with L. Novák, who criticised our paper “Různá pojetí matematiky u vybraných autorů od antiky po raný novověk.” Novák’s critique titled “Tomáš Akvinský instrumentalistou v matematice?” served as an incentive for us not only to clarify certain points, but also to deepen our original exposition. We focused on Aquinas’s understanding of mathematics, the middle sciences and philosophy. We still insist that two substantially different interpretations of these disciplines are possible. On the one hand, there is much evidence for Aquinas’s realistic approach to mathematics and the middle sciences. On the other hand, ideas can also be found in Aquinas’s texts supporting an instrumentalist reading. In our opinion, it is important to point out these two approaches to the mathematical sciences in order to adequately understand the subsequent evolution of the history of ideas, especially in the modern period.