Volume 89, Issue 1

This article offers a detailed analysis of Henry of Ghent's understanding of weakness of will in his Quodlibeta and reveals the psychological and metaphysical ideas behind it. Henry's voluntaristic approach becomes evident when he emphasises that the original cause of weak-willed actions is to be located in the will, although they are also accompanied by a simultaneously occurring error of intellect caused by the will's movement. The development of Henry's position in this matter is closely connected with theological debates around the Parisian condemnation of 1277. His extensive treatment of weakness of will proves that this problem does not lose its philosophical edge in the Middle Ages – even for voluntaristic authors like Henry.

The Renaissance sceptic and medical doctor Francisco Sanchez has been rather unduly neglected in scholarly work on Renaissance scepticism. In this paper I discuss his scepticism against the background of the ancient distinction between Academic and Pyrrhonian scepticism. I argue that Sanchez was a Pyrrhonist rather than, as has been claimed in recent years, a mitigated Academic sceptic. In keeping with this I shall also try to show that Sanchez was crucially influenced by the ancient medical school of empiricism, a school closely allied with Pyrrhonism.

Looking at Hobbes' theory of thinking as calculation and truth by convention shows that a certain type of scientism of the mind leads to fundamental problems. If truth is the artefact of social conventions about signs, and if thinking is nothing but the syntactical transformations of sign, a theory of thinking must have both: a strong concept of natural computation and a social theory of establishing sign-conventions. Hobbes does not, like modern physicalist theories of the mind, have both.

In this article it is argued that Popper's well-known deductive and falsificationistic epistemology is historically rooted in German psychology, notably the work of Otto Selz. Drawing on Popper's early and still unpublished psychological manuscripts it is shown how Otto Selz's psychology of thinking with its emphasis on the guiding role of schematic anticipations gave the impetus to Popper's theory of problem solving, his theory of the Searchlight, and its attendant rejection of empiricism, the so-called Bucket theory of knowledge. In the second part of the article it is argued that Selz's theory of schematic anticipations is rooted in Meinong's Gegenstandstheorie . Because Meinong's theory was partly an attempt to do justice to the objectivity of thinking, this may explain why the anti-psychologist Popper felt nevertheless attracted to the psychology of Selz.

Terry Penner and Christopher Rowe, Plato's “Lysis” . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2005, xiv + 366 pp. ( Francisco J. Gonzalez ) John Dillon, The Heirs of Plato. A Study of the old Academy (347–274 B.C.) . Oxford: Clarendon Press 2003. viii + 252 pp. ( Mark J. Edwards ) Dominik Perler / Ulrich Rudolph (Hrsg.): Logik und Theologie. Das Organon im arabischen und im lateinischen Mittelalter . Leiden: Brill 2005, 511 pp. ( Sten Ebbesen ) Michelle Kosch: Freedom and Reason in Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard . Oxford: Clarendon Press 2006, X + 236 Seiten. ( Markus Gabriel )