Mikko Yrjönsuuri - Böcker

Central topics in medieval logic are here treated in a way that is congenial to the modern reader, without compromising historical reliability, rendering the achievements of medieval logic available to a broad philosophical public. The three genres of logica moderna arising in a later Middle Ages are covered: obligations, insolubles and consequences. The articles on obligations look at the role of logical consistence in medieval disputation techniques. Those on insolubles concentrate on medieval solutions to the Liar Paradox. There is also a systematic account of how medieval authors described the logical content of an inference, and how they thought that the validity of an inference could be guaranteed.

As with almost all books, this one took much longer to complete than we thought when we started. It began within the research project "Actions and Passions of the Mind from 1200-1700" which was financed by the Nordic Research Council in the Humanities (NOS-H) between 1999 and 2001, but as the topic became clearer the book grew and the final product involves several people outside the original group in the NOS-H project. Many of the papers published here started as talks given at meetings of the project, but no meeting resembles the finished book. Indeed, all the articles are, in the end, written just for this volume. One of the overarching aims of the NOS-H project was to highlight the continuity between medieval and modem philosophy of mind, and, as edi­ tors, we also took this perspective when planning the volume. The individual articles pertain to give an accurate and philosophically interesting treatment of the thinker or period they discuss, but nonetheless the overall picture isone of continuity between not only medieval and early modem psychology of action, but also between late ancient and medieval thinking on emotions and choice.

The essays in this book give a comprehensive picture of the medieval development of philosophical theories concerning the nature of emotions and the influence they have on human choice. The historical span reaches from the late ancient to the early modern philosophy, showing in detail how old and new ideas were bred and brought into the Middle Ages, and how they resulted in a genuinely modern perspective in the thought of Descartes. The essays are original contributions by a mixture of senior scholars and young researchers writing on their own specialties.

The aim of the present work is to show the roots of the conception of perception as an active process, tracing the history of its development from Plato to modern philosophy.

The aim of the present work is to show the roots of the conception of perception as an active process, tracing the history of its development from Plato to modern philosophy. The contributors inquire into what activity is taken to mean in different theories, challenging traditional historical accounts of perception that stress the passivity of percipients in coming to know the external world. Special attention is paid to the psychological and physiological mechanisms of perception, rational and non-rational perception and the role of awareness in the perceptual process.Perception has often been conceived as a process in which the passive aspects - such as the reception of sensory stimuli - were stressed and the active ones overlooked. However, during recent decades research in cognitive science and philosophy of mind has emphasized the activity of the subject in the process of sense perception, often associating this activity to the notions of attention and intentionality. Although it is recognized that there are ancient roots to the view that perception is fundamentally active, the history remains largely unexplored.The book is directed to all those interested in contemporary debates in the fields of philosophy of mind and cognitive psychology who would like to become acquainted with the historical background of active perception, but for historical reliability the aim is to make no compromises.