Exploration of the Arabic psychological theory underlying Piers Plowmanand the interpretive insights this offers. The psychology underlying Passus 8-20 of Piers Plowmanremains unexplored in its entirety, despite single articles on separate psychological personifications. Professor Kaulbach aims to remedy this huge gap in our understanding of Langland's poem, by adducing a psychology which not only illuminates previously mysterious relations between psychological actants, but also reveals that many apparently non-psychological figures (Piers Plowman, for example) are best explained by reference to psychological theory. The body of psychological theory on which the author draws is that of Arabic, specifically Avicennan theory of the prophetic mental act, the `vis imaginativa' or `ymaginatif' in Middle English. Beyond the original interpretative insights offered by this book Professor Kaulbach also describes the intellectual and manuscript context in which Arabic psychology was made available to a late fourteenth century English poet. ERNEST N. KAULBACHis Associate Professor of English, Classics and (occasionally) Philosophy at the University of Texas at Austin.

"This is a translation of [F. Stuart] Crawford's edition of the medieval Latin text presumed to have been rendered from Arabic into Latin by Michael Scot perhaps around 1220"--P. cvii.

Examines the role of God in medieval Islamic philosophy and theology in a new and exciting way. Renouncing the traditional chronological method of considering Islamic philosophy, Netton uses modern literary modes of criticism derived from structuralism, post-structuralism and semiotics.

This volume offers a wide-ranging and profound collection of essays on philosophical psychology and conceptions of modality from antiquity to the present day, with some essays on the philosophy of religion as well.

This monograph presents new material on Francisco Suárez’s comprehensive theory of sense perception. The core theme is perceptual intentionality in Suárez’s theory of the senses, external and internal, as presented in his Commentaria una cum quaestionibus in libros Aristotelis De anima published in 1621. The author targets the question of the multistage genesis of perceptual acts by considering the ontological “items” involved in the procession of sensory information. However, the structural issue is not left aside, and the nature of the relationship due to which our perceptions are mental representations of this or that object is also considered. The heuristic historiographical background includes not only the theories of classical authors, such as Aristotle and Aquinas, but also those of late medieval authors of the fourteenth century. These are headed by John Duns Scotus, John of Jandun, Peter Auriol and Peter John Olivi. Readers will discover the differences between Suárez’s and Aquinas’s views, as well as other sources that may have served as positive inspiration for the Jesuit’s theory. By considering the late medieval philosophy of the fourteenth century, this book helps, to a certain extent, to fill a gap in the historiography of philosophy regarding the link between late medieval and early modern scholasticism. In the first part of the book, the metaphysics of the soul and powers is considered. Chapters on the external senses follow, covering topics such as the sensible species, the causes of sensation, self-awareness, and the ordering of the external senses. A further chapter is devoted to the internal senses and the author argues that by reducing the number and functional scope of the interior senses Suárez deepens the gap between the external senses and the intellect, but he reduces it through emphasizing the unifying efficacy of the soul.This book brings a synthetic and unifying perspective to contemporary research and will particularly appeal to graduate students and researchers in theology and philosophy, especially philosophy of mind.

The first comprehensive study of the philosophical achievements of twelfth-century Western Europe.