Links go to abstracts of books and papers, except in the case of the book reviews, where I supply the full text.
The Philosophy of Aquinas (Boulder: Westview Press, 2003). Coauthored with Christopher Shields.
Cambridge Translations of Medieval Philosophical Texts. Volume III: Mind and Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Thomas Aquinas on Human Nature. A Philosophical Study of Summa theologiae 1a 75-89 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002).
Thomas Aquinas, Treatise on Human Nature (Summa theologiae 1a 75-89) (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2002).
Thomas Aquinas, Commentary on Aristotle's De anima, translation with introduction and notes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999).
Theories of Cognition in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997).
“Id Quo Cognoscimus,” in H. Lagerlund and P. Kärkkäinen (eds.) Theories of Perception in Medieval and Early Modern Thought (forthcoming).
“The Mind-Soul Problem,” in H. Thijssen (ed.) Mind, Perception, and Cognition (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008).
"Democritus on Secondary Qualities," Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 89 (2007) 99-121.
“Mind and Extension (Descartes, Hobbes, More),” in H. Lagerlund and O. Pluta (eds.) Forming the Mind (Dordrecht: Springer, 2007).
“Aquinas on Abstract Truth,” in H. Lagerlund (ed.), Representation and Objects of Thought in Medieval Philosophy (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), 33-63.
“A Theory of Secondary Qualities,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 73 (2006) 568-91.
“Form, Substance, and Mechanism,” Philosophical Review 113 (2004) 31-88.
“Human Nature” in A. S. McGrade (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 208-30.
“Souls and the Beginning of Life (A Reply to Haldane and Lee),” Philosophy 78 (2003) 509-19.
“Cognition,” in T. Williams (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus (Cambridge University Press, 2003), 285-311.
“What is Cognition? A Reply to Some Critics,” American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 76 (2002) 483-90.
“Final Causes and Intentionality,” in D. Perler (ed.) Intentionality in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy (Brill, 2001) 301-23.
"Plotting Augustine's Confessions," Logos: A Journal of Catholic Thought and Culture 3 (2000) 77-106.
This paper was originally intended as a guide to teaching the Confessions in the setting of an introductory philosophy class. The above link goes to a full-text version of the paper (with permission from the editors at Logos). The published version slightly differs from the web version.
"Sensible Qualities: The Case of Sound" Journal of the History of Philosophy 38 (2000) 27-40.
"Divine Illumination" in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (November 2, 1999).
"Peter John Olivi" in The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (November 2, 1999).
"What is Sound?" Philosophical Quarterly 49 (1999) 309-24.
"Olivi on Human Freedom" in Pierre De Jean Olivi (1248-1298) (Paris: Vrin, 1999) 15-25.
"Aquinas and the Content Fallacy," Modern Schoolman 75 (1998) 293-314.
"Aquinas on Thought's Linguistic Nature," Monist 80 (1997) 558-75.
"Olivi on the Metaphysics of Soul," Medieval Philosophy and Theology 6 (1997) 109-32.
"Petri Iohannis Olivi Tractatus de verbo" in Essays in Honor of Fr. Gedeon Gál (St. Bonaventure, NY: Franciscan Institute Press, 1997). (Franciscan Studies 53 (1993) 121- 53.)
"Who Needs an Answer to Skepticism?" American Philosophical Quarterly 33 (1996) 421-32.
"William Heytesbury on Knowledge: Epistemology Without Necessary and Sufficient Conditions," History of Philosophy Quarterly 12 (1995) 347-66.
"Henry of Ghent and the Twilight of Divine Illumination," Review of Metaphysics 49 (1995) 49-75.
"Justified Until Proven Guilty: William Alston's New Epistemology" in Philosophical Studies 72 (1993) 1-33.
Review of Eleonore Stump, Aquinas, in Mind (forthcoming).
Review of John Inglis, On Aquinas , in Philosophical Books (forthcoming).
Review of Thomas Aquinas, On Evil (translations by R. Regan and J.A. & J.T. Oesterle) in Review of Metaphysics (forthcoming).
Review of Dennis Des Chene, Life’s Form: Late Aristotelian Conceptions of the Soul, in The Philosophical Review 111 (2002) 308-10.
Review of Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Being , in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2003) <http://ndpr.icaap.org/content/archives/2003/12/pasnau-kenny.html>.
“William Crathorn,” in J. Gracia and T. Noone (eds.) The Blackwell Companion to Medieval Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003).
Review of Stephen J. Pope, The Ethics of Aquinas, in Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews (2003).
Review of Richard Cross, The Physics of Duns Scotus: The Scientific Context of a Theological Vision, in Speculum 77 (2002) 1268-70.
Review of Armand Maurer, The Philosophy of William of Ockham in the Light of Its Principles in Journal of the History of Philosophy 38 (2000) 590-91.
Review of John Finnis, Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory in Faith and Philosophy 17 (2000) 407-13.
The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (1998). Articles on Peter Aureol, William Crathorn, Robert Holcot, and Peter John Olivi.
Review of Jerome Gellman, Experience of God and the Rationality of Theistic Belief in The Philosophical Review 107 (1998) 624-26.
Review of Thomas Nagel, Other Minds: Critical Essays 1969- 1994 in Review of Metaphysics 50 (1997) 166-68.
Review of Simon Kemp, Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages in Isis 88 (1997) 703-4.
Review of Roderick Chisholm, A Realistic Theory of Categories: An Essay on Ontology in Review of Metaphysics 666-67.
Review of John Wippel, Mediaeval Reactions to the Encounter Between Faith and Reason in The Review of Metaphysics 50 (1997) 179-80.
Review of Francisco Suarez, On Efficient Causality. Metaphysical Disputations 17, 18, and 19 (translated by Alfred Freddoso) in The Philosophical Review 105 (1996) 533-35.
Review of Robert Fogelin, Pyrrhonian Reflections on Knowledge and Justification in The Review of Metaphysics 49 (1996) 653-54.
Review of Stephen Everson, Language (Companions to Ancient Thought 3) in The Review of Metaphysics 49 (1996) 650- 51.
Review of Robert Audi, Action, Intention, and Reason in The Review of Metaphysics 49 (1995) 398-400.
Review of Anthony Kenny's Aquinas on Mind in The Philosophical Review 103 (1994) 745-48.
Review of Richard Dales's Medieval Discussions of the Eternity of the World in Speculum (July 1992) 654-656 (co-authored with Norman Kretzmann).
Of the many areas of philosophy to which late medieval thinkers made original and insightful contributions, none is more worthy of study than their work on human cognition and knowledge. Many of the issues that dominate philosophy of mind and epistemology today -- mental representation, materialism, direct versus representational realism, foundationalism, skepticism -- were hotly debated during the scholastic period. Indeed, in many cases the scholastics were the first in the Western philosophical tradition to give these problems sustained consideration.
The book begins with the theoretical foundations of scholastic accounts of cognition, and moves toward the underlying epistemological concerns that became increasingly prominent as the scholastic period developed. My point of departure is Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274), the first in the later medieval period to establish a coherent and comprehensive account of cognition and knowledge. I contrast Aquinas's work with its later medieval criticism and frequent rejection, focusing in particular on two figures: Peter John Olivi (1248-1298) and William Ockham (ca.1285-1347).
I have sought, by looking at Aquinas through the eyes of his near contemporaries, to reach a clearer understanding of Aquinas's own views. Just as importantly, I have tried to work out in detail some of the novel theories of mind and cognition offered by later scholastics. The heart of the book is my discussion of Olivi and Ockham. These two Franciscans, living a generation apart, offer similar challenges to Aquinas and traditional accounts of cognition. Both reject analyses of thought and perception that postulate inner representations mediating between our cognitive acts and the external objects of those acts. Their alternative proposals eliminate all such intermediaries in favor of direct realism.
Along the way toward working out the details of their accounts I take up many of the central problems (then and now) in the philosophy of mind and epistemology. Separate chapters are devoted to the medieval notion of intentionality, the roles of resemblance and causality in explaining mental representation, and the degree of passivity in perception. I go on to argue that, contrary to what is commonly supposed, Aquinas holds a theory of perception that involves intermediaries of a sort that most proponents of direct realism would reject. Hence the proposals of Olivi and Ockham constitute a genuine alternative to standard scholastic accounts.
The "Treatise on Human Nature" is the most philosophically rich section of the Summa theologiae; it contains Aquinas's definitive statements on the mind-body problem, action theory, sensation, and the workings of intellect. Although one of the most familiar parts of Aquinas's corpus, the Treatise is not well understood. I hope to foster modern appreciation for Aquinas by considering the text in careful philosophical detail. Rather than offer a running commentary, I focus on some of the most interesting portions of the Treatise, always considering them in the context of Aquinas's full corpus, with an eye to the best medieval and modern commentators and critics.
Perhaps the most far-reaching ideas in the Treatise come from Aquinas's attempt to explain human nature in terms of soul and body, without falling into either a dualism of mind versus matter, or a reductive materialism according to which matter, in the final analysis, is all there is. He avoids dualism by holding that soul and body are united by Aristotle's form-matter relationship in such a way as to produce a single, unified substance. He avoids reductive materialism by analyzing the entire physical world not in terms of various groupings of physical stuff, in assorted sizes and colors, but as diverse modes of what he calls actuality. Sometimes this actuality exists in a physical mode, sometimes not. It is distinctive of the human intellect that it is entirely nonphysical, even though it is a unified part of a physical human being. Viewed from Aquinas's perspective, there is nothing puzzling about such immateriality. Given that all we see are physical modes of actuality, we tend to assume that physical stuff is all there is. Our problem, Aquinas thinks, is that our imaginations won't go beyond that, and so we fail to see that our material world is just one way in which actuality is manifested.
Just as Aquinas insists on the unity of the soul-body composite, so he stresses that the workings of the soul are performed not by isolated faculties, but by complexly interrelated operations. Sensation, in human beings, takes much of its content from the intellect's conceptualization. Intellect, in turn, constantly relies on the senses so as to frame its thoughts in light of sensory images. The bases of human action are likewise cooperative. Freedom of choice stems from will and intellect making choices in tandem. "Weakness of will" aptly describes those cases where the will, due to temptation or habit, fails to take seriously the intellect's judgment about the proper course of action. Because Aquinas believes that human beings have an inherent sense of moral truth (synderesis), weakness of will lies at the heart of Aquinas's account of immoral action.