Sylabus
Course Outline
1. Introduction. The Ancients’ Assimilation. Aristotle and Augustine
2. Thomas Aquinas’ re-assessments: a) many minds, one world b) intentionality between activity/passivity c) detailing the minds: the angel d) the separate soul e) God
3. John Duns Scotus striking back against Aquinas. a) a bigger mind b) how many minds? c) assimilation d) metaphysics
4. Some later evaluations. Descartes and the finite mind that is able to conceive of the infinite
Anotace
WINTER 2020
Charles University
Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies
BA course+Erasmus
Email: anna.tropia@ff.cuni.cz
How does the mind know the world? This classical question, at the base of every doctrine of intentionality, will be the starting point of this course. On the one hand, there is the cognitive subject, with its mental structure and constitution – on the other, the world, which can be considered as the totality of the objects that the mind can cognize. Medieval philosophers received from the Ancients the idea that, in order to know something, the knower must become similar to it – by assimilating itself to the known thing. How this “assimilation principle” arrives to the Middles Ages – and how it is appropriated by the Medievals – is a multifaced story, declined in many and different ways. In this course, the doctrines of two of the most representative thinkers of the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) and John Duns Scotus (1266-1308), will be analysed in order to reveal the main differences – and the main points of contacts – between them. More particularly, the bank-test to clear their positions will be offered by the treatment of human and angelic cognition.
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