The Many Virtues of Second Nature : Habitus in Latin Medieval Philosophy

This chapter consists of a systematic introduction to the nature and function of habitus in Latin medieval philosophy. Over the course of this introduction, several topics are treated: the theoretical necessity to posit habitus; their nature; their causal contribution to the production of internal and external acts; how and why habitus can grow and decay; what makes their unity when they can have multiple objects and work in clusters. Finally we examine two specific questions: why intellectual habitus represent a special case that triggered considerable debate; how human beings can be said to be free if their actions are determined by moral habitus

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Are Cognitive Habits in the Intellect? Durand of St.-Pourçain and Prosper de Reggio Emilia on Cognitive Habits.

Once Socrates has thought something, he comes to acquire an item such that he is then able to think such thoughts again when he wants, and he can, all other things being equal, do this with more ease than he could before. This item that he comes to acquire medieval philosophers called a cognitive habit which most medieval philosophers maintained was a new quality added to Socrates' intellect. However, some disagreed. In this paper, I will examine an interesting alternative theory put forward by Durand of Saint-Pourçain and Prosper de Reggio Emilia about the location of cognitive habits. On their view, cognitive habits are not to be located in the intellect but in something on the side of the body or sensitive soul

Time in Renaissance Philosophy

peer reviewedAs a central dimension of the Human experience, the conception of time has undergone deep transformations during the Renaissance period, in relationship with global evolutions in European arts, sciences, and metaphysics. The Aristotelian definition of time as “a number of motion in respect to before and after” was challenged to open the way to an ontological determination of time, independent from motion and connected to the divine structure of beings in the universe. From Ficino to most innovative thinkers like Telesio, Patrizi. Bruno in particular introduced a relativistic perspective and showed that we should rather speak of a multiplicity of times. The reflection on the difference between time and duration has been another technical issue developed by Renaissance thinkers: since time was no more referred to the Ptolemaic cosmos, the concept of duration was used to designate the internal time of things and existing beings, as Suarez makes clear at the beginning of seventeenth century. This idea of time as an inner reality also had important applications in the field of literature and moral philosophy, as we see for instance in Shakespeare and Montaigne. Although Modern Philosophers like Descartes or Pascal seem to break with the scholastic approach of time, it is interesting to note that the pre-Newtonian concept of “absolute time” is rooted in Renaissance theories of time and the development of Copernicanism leading to the construction of a new reference frame, where the Suarezian “imaginary time” plays a central role