Abstract The aim of this article is to present Hervaeus Natalis’s account of the cognition of particulars by the intellect. Hervaeus develops the view commonly found in the early scholastic period that the intellect grasps particulars by looking at a sensory image of them, or what medieval thinkers call a “phantasm.” In developing this view, he describes in detail how the intellection in question occurs, and defends the view against some objections. Hervaeus is also an early defender of the scholastic theory of objective being, the specific mode of being that things have by being thought of. He combines the standard theory of the intellection of particulars through phantasms with the theory of objective being. This allows him to develop a detailed account of the ontological status and structure of particular objects as intellectually cognised.

Although the history of linguistic thought is a well-established field of research, it still suffers from a relative isolation from the mainstream of historicalphilosophical studies, as though it were more of interest to linguists than to philosophers. This is especially the case when the period under scrutiny is the Renaissance and early modern age, and the subject matter is ordinary language. Debates about language in general and artificial languages in particular tend to attract the interest of philosophers more easily than debates about natural languages or even “the language of the people.” Lodi Nauta’s book is an attempt to overturn this prejudice by documenting the philosophical import of Renaissance and early modern views of common language and showing that the humanist opposition to scholastic jargon played a significant role in the complex transition from the Middle Ages to modernity.

Abstract The idea of reconciling Ptolemaic planetary theory with Aristotelian natural philosophy by imagining epicycles and eccentric deferents as three-dimensional orbs or orb-segments within larger spheres is frequently associated with Georg Peurbach and his widely read astronomy textbook, the Theoricae novae planetarum (1454). This article cautions against existing tendencies to overstate the originality or revolutionary force of this work by taking a closer look at the early history of the same Ptolemaic-Aristotelian compromise in a Latin European context. Using previously unpublished or unused source material from the twelfth to early fourteenth centuries, it documents the gradual spread and acceptance of an orbicular interpretation of Ptolemy’s planetary models among astronomers and university teachers.

Abstract The late fourteenth-century English Carmelite Richard Lavenham was a prolific author of Latin and vernacular treatises on logic, physics, philosophy, and theology. Among other works pertaining to natural philosophy, he authored the short Tractatus terminorum naturalium, preserved in three complete or almost complete late fourteenth- or early fifteenth-century copies, with the opening passage preserved in three other manuscripts. The text is fundamentally a redaction of the Heytesburian Termini naturales, a brief glossary of technical vocabulary of the natural philosophy and physics of the Oxford Calculators, supplemented by additional textual and pictorial material. As such, Lavenham’s treatise is a specific branch of an influential tradition of school texts that took the form of elementary treatises, additional glosses, quaestio-commentaries, and excerpts.

Review of Can Laurens Löwe, Thomas Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Human Act. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. xiv + 225 pp. isbn 9781108833646.

Abstract Medieval philosophers had a predilection for using the correlative pair father and son as an illustrative example in their discussions of relations. The use of this example has sometimes led to charges of confusion on the grounds that fatherhood and sonship are not proper converses. The present article shows how a group of twelfth-century philosophers from the milieu around the logician Alberic of Paris handled the problems arising from the use of this illustrative example which they had inherited from their ancient and late-ancient predecessors.

Abstract The identification of two possible readings – de re and de dicto – of modal claims is considered one of the greatest achievements of Abelard’s logic. In the Dialectica and the Logica “Ingredientibus,” Abelard uses this distinction as a basis for his modal semantics and theory of modalities. Rather than focusing on Abelard’s own theory, the aim of this article is to pay attention to a number of sources that – like Abelard’s logical works – are datable to the first decades of the twelfth century, to investigate whether the de re–de dicto distinction was already adopted and debated in them. It argues that, even if there is no systematic theorization of the distinction in these sources, Abelard’s contemporaries put forward a number of questions concerning the syntax and the signification of modal claims that contributed to set the stage for the distinction’s identification and later development.