In the previous chapter, I added similarity-based signs or icons to the standard menu of referential options. In this chapter, I want to explore the ramifications of this addition for perception. Peirce saw good reason to push his prescissive analysis of iconicity down to a single quality. I thus contrast his account with that of John Poinsot, a medieval philosopher who held that a sign always retains a slight distinction between the object it signifies and the vehicle that does the signifying. Because iconic merger gives us a way to vindicate ordinary perception, I favour Peirce’s stance. The resulting view goes against the claim, put forward by John Locke, that the “secondary” qualities we experience are mere figments. I therefore do my best to undermine that Lockean worldview. Although some philosophers believe that putting qualities back into the world results in panpsychism, I try to find a less far-fetched way to express this.

Seeing Things as They Are

This study aims to present a comparative analysis of philosophical theories of universals espoused by the foremost representatives of the three main schools of early modern scholastic thought. The book introduces the doctrines of Francisco Suarez, S.J. (1548–1617), the Thomist John of St. Thomas, O.P. (1589–1644), and the Scotists Bartolomeo Mastri da Meldola, O.F.M. Conv. (1602–1673) and Bonaventura Belluto, O.F.M. Conv. (1600–1676). The author examines in detail their mutual doctrinal delineation as well as the conceptualist tenet of the Jesuit Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza (1578–1641), whose thought constitutes an important systematic point of comparison especially with Suarez’s doctrine. The book offers the first comparative elaboration of the issue of universals, in both its metaphysical and its epistemological aspects, in the era of second scholasticism.

Universals in second scholasticism : a comparative study with focus on the theories of Francisco Suárez S.J. (1548-1617), João Poinsot O.P. (1589-1644) and Bartolomeo Mastri da Meldola O.F.M. Conv. (1602-1673)/Bonaventura Belluto O.F.M. Conv. (1600-1676)

This article aims to analyze the Poinsot´s doctrine about the formal sign of which the concept is the case par excellence. We seek to answer the question if the formal sign theory is a correct interpretation of Thomas Aquinas. The representative nature of this sign raises issues that we seek to solve.

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Signo formal y objetualidad. Examen de la doctrina de Juan Poinsot

In the twentieth century, the advance of modern particle physics and the discovery of an inherent probabilism at the heart of the natural order has thrown scientific determinism into doubt,(1) The central question that issues from such findings in physics is whether nature is inherently indeterminate or simply defectively known. If the answer is the former, then this development calls into question the central theoretical justification for the Kantian project.(2) For although Kant makes rhetorical allusion to Nicholas Copernicus, his theory plainly stands in defense of Sir Isaac Newton's classical mechanics. Kant embraced the Newtonian view that nature is inherently determinate and thus saw the science of probability as "truth, known however on insufficient grounds, and the knowledge of which, though thus imperfect, is not on that account deceptive; and such doctrine, accordingly, is not to be separated from the analytic part of logic."(3) In order to preserve the classical mechanics of Newton in the face of the Humean attack upon the universality and objective necessity of scientific judgment, Kant believed that he had to locate the attributes that constitute an object as a scientific object within the very cognitive forms of intuitive and conceptive cognition. Kant was unaware, as are most academic philosophers today, that late Latin scholastics, especially on the Iberian peninsula, had also struggled for an account of the intellect's ability to order our experience of the real and so constitute a properly scientific object. The results of this effort were, of course, quite unlike those of the Kantian solution and compatible with a completely different view of the natural order. Even more important for the history of Western philosophy, the results were immediately and thoroughly eclipsed by the rise of Cartesianism. The great scholastic effort to understand how scientific objects are constituted passed from the modern period into intellectual oblivion. Yet there are ample reasons to think that an exploration of these forgotten, pre-Kantian views might shed some light on contemporary efforts to fashion a postclassical epistemology and philosophy of science. Despite the more primitive cosmology, basic concepts of epistemological theory developed by the Latins are far more easily disengaged from medieval physics than are Kantian concepts from Newtonian mechanics. Kant is committed in principle to the view that space, for example, is mathematizable a priori in a completely deterministic manner. This is a much more wide-ranging and deeply-rooted metaphysical commitment than is the claim, for example, that there are only six observable planets. What follows is an examination of a generally forgotten theory of objective constitution--one that avoids unnecessary entanglements with the determinism of Newtonian mechanics if only by predating the Cartesian and Kantian turns. It is a theory that in principle allows nature to live by other rules than those of mechanical necessity and one that, I believe, rightly recognizes that nature's laws can suffer exception without thereby destroying the possibility of scientific knowledge. Moreover, it is a "bridge" theory that unites classical and contemporary philosophic tendencies, for despite its strong medieval roots, it is a theory largely committed to the fundamental insight of modernity that the knower, in some measure, must condition the object known. Just as Immanuel Kant best illustrates the epistemology of classical modern times, so John Poinsot does the same for late Latin developments in epistemology.(4) Both come at the end of their respective ages, and both undertake to synthesize the work of all their main predecessors in the light of the problem of objectivity as they understand it. The seventeenth-century philosopher John Poinsot was certainly not the only figure from within the "second scholasticism" to hold an interest in the question of how the knower conditions the known. …

Edward J. Furton

Papers

The Constitution of the Object in Immanuel Kant and John Poinsot