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  • Philosophical Psychology in Arabic Thought and the Latin Aristotelianism of the 13th Century ed. by Luis Xavier López-Farjeat and Jörg Alejandro Tellkamp
  • Katja Krause
Luis Xavier López-Farjeat and Jörg Alejandro Tellkamp, editors. Philosophical Psychology in Arabic Thought and the Latin Aristotelianism of the 13th Century. Sic et Non. Paris: Libraire Philosophique J. Vrin, 2013. Pp. 303. €32.00.

Philosophical thought in the Islamic World and its influence on thirteenth-century Latin Scholasticism has received increasing attention over recent decades. This small collection of ten essays, which originated at a conference on Philosophical Psychology in Arabic and [End Page 607] Latin Aristotelianism in Mexico City in 2008, is a welcome addition to this trend. The volume includes essays covering five themes related to psychology: method, ontology, science, perception, and intellection. But it does so without an identifiable chronological or thematic order.

Alexander Fidora offers fascinating insights on Gundissalinus’s pivotal role for the method of psychology. Fidora shows how Gundissalinus’s translation of Avicenna’s Liber De Anima and his own Tractatus de anima contributed to the rationalisation of some theological doctrines not only in Christian, but also in Jewish thought (17–39). One of the volume’s highlights is Carlos Bazán’s essay, which critically engages with Aquinas’s conception of the human body’s ontology and its functionality in service to the human soul. Bazán lucidly traces the general principles of natural Aristotelian philosophy guiding Aquinas’s arguments, while also uncovering his theological concerns regarding the corruption and resurrection of the body (243–77). Thérèse-Anne Druart’s essay on the theme of science traces Duns Scotus’s indebtedness to Avicenna’s Metaphysics for his conception of universal notions, the first object of the human intellect, and his famous theory on the univocity of being. Druart adds to recent scholarship showcasing Scotus’s selective borrowings and modifications of standard Avicennian teachings (185–204).

Besides method, ontology, and science, the volume features four essays engaging with the theme of perception. Deborah Black surveys the cogitative faculty’s role in Avicenna’s Liber De Anima, showing that its hybrid imaginative and intellectual character successfully bridges Avicenna’s dualist ontology. Her essay challenges Gutas’s interpretation on two types of thought in the late Avicenna with a more economic explanation of the cogitative power’s functionality (59–81). Luis López-Farjeat provides a study on musical perception in Avicenna, reasoning that only humans, as opposed to animals, can derive pleasure from music thanks to the interrelated workings of their cogitation and intellect. He thereby makes an interesting case that Avicenna’s perception theory goes beyond the physical realm (83–110). Jörg Alejandro Tellkamp discusses Albert the Great’s theory of perceptual intentionality and its indebtedness to Avicenna. In an engaging textual survey, Tellkamp shows how Albert’s theory offers a rapprochement between animal and human perceptual intentionality of the world by assigning sense perception a veridical status in the practical sense (205–21). Jeremiah Hackett confirms Tellkamp’s findings, here for Roger Bacon, showing how he grounds perception and science in a theory of vision common to animals and humans. Hackett shows that for Bacon common sense and science are but different sides of the same coin: knowledge per experientiam (223–41).

The theme of intellection is covered in three essays. Jon McGinnis adds to the Gutas Hasse abstraction debate on Avicenna, reading the Agent Intellect’s role for human cognition vis-à-vis Avicenna’s physical light theory. McGinnis demonstrates the superiority of Avicenna’s explanations of the Agent Intellect’s functions for human knowing compared to Aristotle (41–57). Leaving Avicenna behind, we find Jean-Baptiste Brenet (writing in French) contending that Averroes’s notions of intellect acquisition and attribution in his Long Commentary on the De Anima ought be read in light of his theological conception of act acquisition in his Kitāb al-Kašf‘an manāhiğ al-adilla. Last but not least, in his rich essay Richard Taylor examines how the young Aquinas built his first philosophical account of the human intellectual soul’s status and functions in his In 2 Sent d...

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