The Immateriality of the Human Mind, the Semantics of Analogy, and the Conceivability of God

by Gyula Klima (editor)

The Immateriality of the Human Mind, the Semantics of Analogy, and the Conceivability of God brings together the work of experts in the field of medieval philosophy to consider the nature of God and the soul, what can be known of the divine essence and the semantics of theological discourse from the perspectives of medieval theology (both natural and revealed), logic and natural philosophy. In his capacity as an arts master commenting on a work of natural philosophy, Aristotle s De Anima, John Buridan discusses the immateriality of the intellect against the background of the competing, mutually exclusive views of Alexander of Aphrodisias and Averroes. Aquinas takes up the same issue, but in a more properly theological setting, in his Commentary on the Sentences of Peter Lombard, where Aquinas argues that the being of the intellect is independent of matter. Thomas de Vio Cajetan considers the semantics of theological discourse or God talk in order to derive a proper means to speak of the divine essence in his De Nominum Analogia; and Anselm of Canterbury s Proslogion seeks with unaided reason to develop a single proof whereby those who think seriously of anything as that than which nothing greater can be thought may know that God exists.

120 pages, Hardcover

First published December 1, 2011

About the author

Gyula Klima is Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University, New York, Director of the Research Center for the History of Ideas of the Institute of Hungarian Research, Budapest, Hungary, and a Doctor of the Hungarian Academy of Sciences. He is the Founding Director of the Society for Medieval Logic and Metaphysics and Editor of its Proceedings, as well as the Founding Director of the Society for the European History of Ideas and Editor of its Proceedings. He is also an editor of the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, and the Editor-in-Chief of a book series at Springer, Historical-Analytical Studies in Mind, Nature and Action, and at Fordham, Medieval Philosophy, Texts and Studies. Before taking up his position at Fordham, he had taught philosophy in the US at Yale and Notre Dame, prior to which he had done research in Europe at the universities of Budapest, Helsinki, St. Andrews, and Copenhagen.