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John Haldane
History: Medieval and Renaissance Philosophy of Mind

Since the late 1960s there has been a significant and fast-expanding interest in medieval philosophy, and
though once largely confined to questions of logic and general ontology, the range of this interest has now
extended to cover most aspects of normative enquiry such as ethics, politics and aesthetics (see Haldane,
1991, 1992). The philosophy of the Renaissance is far less widely studied, though in recent times there have
been signs of a developing interest and no doubt in the coming years there will be an expansion and intensi-
fication of this. One may doubt, however, whether the renaissance is as likely as the medieval period to
catch and hold the interests of philosophers, as distinct from cultural historians, for while the renaissance
produced striking innovations in the style of speculative writing and saw the emergence of secular human-
ism it had relatively little to add to the philosophical systems developed in the middle ages. These systems
were themselves related to earlier ways of thinking, in particular to those of Plato and Aristotle, but the
medievals added much to what antiquity had produced. Here I shall mention authors of the early middle ages
through whose work the ideas of antiquity were communicated to later periods, and writers of the early
modern period who paved the way for Descartes; but I will focus upon the major figures of the high middle
ages.

The expression ‘philosophy of mind’ is a modern one. In antiquity and in the medieval and renaissance
periods writers discussed questions that are of central interest to present-day philosophers, such as the
relation of persons to their bodies, the structure of intentional ACTION and the nature of IMAGINATION,
MEMORY and mental reference, but these were taken to be aspects of psychology in an older sense of the
term, connoting the description (logos) of the soul (psuche). The word ‘psychology’ itself probably first
appears in the sixteenth century in writings by two German authors –Johannes Freigius and Goclenius of
Marburg– published in 1575 and 1590, respectively. Like their medieval predecessors these authors
considered the study of the soul to be part of natural philosophy and regarded the classic text on the subject
to be Aristotle’s De Anima. Indeed, it is barely an exaggeration to say that medieval and renaissance philo-
sophy of mind consists of commentaries and reflections on that work.

A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW

The writings of Aristotle were received into the Latin West through two sources. First, through the work of
early translators and commentators such as Boethius (480-524), Cassiodorus (490-585) and Isidore of
Seville (570-636). However, these figures knew very little of Aristotle’s authentic corpus and were them-
selves neo-Platonists subscribing to the dualistic world-view espoused by Plotinus (204-69) and, in Christia-
nized form, by St Augustine (354-430). Isidore produced a work entitled De Anima but it was Augustinian,
not Aristotelian, in inspiration. In it he argued for the immateriality and immortality of individual souls on
the basis of the non-empirical nature of the objects of thought, i.e. transcendental essences and truths, and
the ancient principle that activities and their objects are of like kind. From this period, however, two
important and long-lasting definitions emerged: Augustine’s account of the human soul as ‘a rational
substance suited for ruling a body’ (De Quantitate Animae, 13) and Boethius’ definition of a person as ‘an
individual substance of rational nature’ (Contra Eutychen, 6). Both are dualistic in intent, though while
Boethius’ general account is worded so as to allow for unembodied persons its formulation permitted later
non-dualists and even materialists to claim that their views were in accord with ancient tradition (see
DUALISM). Indeed, this definition would be acceptable to a present-day philosopher such as DAVIDSON
who advocates ‘ANOMALOUS MONISM’, a version of non-reductive PHYSICALISM.

The second and more fruitful source of Aristotelian writings was the Arab world. In the century prior to
Boethius, Syrian Christians translated ancient Greek texts into Syriac, and several centuries later their suc-
cessors arrived in Baghdad where they began to produce Arabic translations of these works. In due course
Moslem philosophers became interested in these writings, making commentaries on them and appropriating
some of their ideas. The most important of these Islamic figures were Alfarabi (890-950), Avicenna (980-
1037) and Averroes (1126-98) – the last of whom was to be a source of major disputes, in both the medieval
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and renaissance periods, about the human soul. During the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, editions of
Aristotle in Greek and Arabic, and supporting commentaries, began to appear in the West where they were
rapidly translated into Latin. A mark of the significance of their reception is that St Thomas Aquinas (1225-
74), undisputedly the greatest medieval philosopher, seems to have composed his discussions of human
nature and the soul (Summa Theologiae, I, 75-89; Quaestiones Disputatae De Anima) and commentary on
Aristotle’s text (Sententia super De Anima) within a year or so of his Dominican associate William of Moer-
beke (1215-86) having translated Aristotle into Latin in about 1268.

Such developments in psychology as were initiated during the renaissance were also coincident with the
production of new translations of the De Anima. In the fifteenth century philosophers were still using Moer-
beke’s translation together with editions of Greek, Arab and Latin commentaries; but as the new humanism
developed, inspired by the antiquarian rediscovery of the classical ages, writers became increasingly critical
of what they regarded as ‘corrupt’ medieval Latin texts and they produced new Greek and ‘refined’ Latin
editions in Ciceronian style. As important as the text of De Anima itself were the early Greek commentaries,
for they provided secular authors with pre-scholastic, pre-Arabic perspectives on the Aristotelian idea of the
soul. Furthermore, the rediscovery of antiquity brought Platonic and neo-Platonist views back onto the
scene. During the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries psychology was no longer pursued in a unitary
scholastic fashion, and by about 1550 the tradition of medieval thought was more or less at an end. There
were scholastic authors writing after that date – as there are even today. Francisco Suarez (1548-1617) and
John of St Thomas (1589-1644) both took their inspiration from Aristotle and Aquinas; but by that point a
new agenda was developing in psychology as Hobbes (1588-1679) and Descartes (1596-1650) tried in their
very different ways (materialist and dualist, respectively) to relate the existence and nature of the mind,
conceived largely in terms of CONSCIOUSNESS, to the human body, by then thought of as a machine
composed out of material elements whose intrinsic nature is geometrical – in effect, atoms in the void,

MEDIEVAL SCHOLASTICISM

Descartes rejected many aspects of traditional Aristotelian psychology and introduced new ways of thinking.
Most importantly, perhaps, he replaced the idea of the soul as a single source of life and reason with the
notion that the latter is an attribute of a distinct element, viz, the mind. It is also worth observing, however,
that much of what is regarded as definitive of Cartesianism is to be found in earlier writings, in particular in
the work of Augustine and those scholastics whom he influenced such as St Bonaventure (1217-74). It is
commonly assumed, for example, that Descartes is the author of the proof that even if one is deceived in
believing one has a body, nonetheless it is certain that one exists as a thinking thing: ‘Cogito ergo sum’, ‘I
think, therefore I am’. However, as contemporaries of Descartes, such as Antoine Arnauld (1612-94) and
Andreas Colvius observed, this argument (or a close relative of it) is anticipated by Augustine in De Civitate
Dei XI, 26, where he insists ‘Si fallor sum’ ([Even] if I err, I am). Descartes’ response to these observations
was either to set them aside, as in his rejoinder to Arnauld (Reply to the Fourth Set of Objections, in
Haldane and Ross, 1912), or else to claim, as in his reply to Colvius, that Augustine was making a different
point (Letter to Colvius, 14 November 1640, in Kenny, 1970).

Similarly, it is common to credit Descartes with the idea that a thinker is infallible with respect to his own
subjective psychology. But again this is to be found in Augustine: ‘[I]t could not possibly happen that the
soul should think about what is itself in the same way that it thinks about what is not’ (De Trinitate, X, 10:
see also De Vera Religione 39, 73). Equally, while finding dualism compelling, Augustine is puzzled by the
relationship between the soul and the body and the manner of their causal interaction in the same ways as
would trouble Descartes. Augustine writes: “The manner in which spirits are united to bodies is altogether
wonderful and transcends the understanding of men (De Civitate Dei, XXI, 10); and twelve hundred years
later Descartes comments: ‘It does not seem to me that the human mind is capable of conceiving quite
distinctly and at the same time both the distinction between mind and body, and their union’ (Kenny, 1970,
p. 142).
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However, the reception of Aristotelianism in the thirteenth century brought with it a more naturalistic
perspective on the central philosophical question of psychology; the ontological nature of human persons
(see THE SELF). Clearly, in this context, NATURALISM is not to be identified with physicalism – though
in succeeding centuries quasi-materialist views began to emerge. For the Latin authors of the high middle
ages, however, materialism was unthinkable. For one thing they were religious believers, usually members
of monastic religious orders (Albert the Great (1206-80) and Aquinas were Dominicans; Bonaventure.
Duns Scotus (1266-1308) and William of Ockham (1285-1349) were Franciscans) and were committed to
upholding theological doctrines concerning the human soul, such as that it is a spiritual entity specially
created by God, which survives bodily death and may exist for eternity. In addition, many of them believed
that reason alone is capable of demonstrating the immateriality and immortality of the soul. (The drift
towards philosophical scepticism is marked by Scotus’ doubting that the latter is provable (Opus Oxoniense,
4, 43) and Ockham’s denying that it is (Quodlibet, I, 12).) There is not space here to consider these proofs,
but given the present-day interest in the ‘aboutness’ of thought, it is worth noting that several of them (such
as that offered by Aquinas in the Summa Theologiae, I, 75) turn upon the nature of INTENTIONALITY
and its difference from physical relations. (Indeed, the very term and concept originate in the medieval
notion of esse intentionale, the ‘intentional being’ of thoughts.)

While medieval philosophy remained anti-materialist, the availability of the De Anima together with sophis-
ticated Arab commentaries led to a new and important phase in Western thinking about the nature of the
mind. The two central issues concerned the ontological category of the soul, whether it is a particular thing
in its own right (hoc aliquid) or a supervenient quality of something, namely a living human body (see
SUPERVENIENCE); and the identity of the soul, whether each person possesses one or many souls, and
indeed whether there is but a single transcendent soul which animates the plurality of human beings. In order
to see how these questions arise, it is necessary to say something about the ideas of the De Anima and how
they differ from the sorts of dualism espoused by Plato, Augustine and Descartes.

As was noted, St Augustine thought of persons as souls using bodies. That is to say he conceived of human
beings as composites of two distinct elements, the one animating (‘anima’ being the Latin equivalent of
‘psuche’) and expressing itself through the other. For Aristotle, by contrast, the soul is thought of in terms of
the general scheme of form and matter. Matter is that out of which something is made, form is the organ-
izing principle which makes it to be the thing it is. If I cut out a paper circle what then lies on the desk is, in
Aristotelian vocabulary, a ‘particular substance’. Although there is but one thing present, nonetheless two
aspects of it can be identified: its matter (paper) and its form (circularity). Similarly, Aristotle claims that the
organizing principle of a living human being, its form, is the soul (De Anima, II, 1). So here again we can
say there is one thing possessed of two aspects, its matter and its form, the latter being in this case a certain
kind of animality.

This is an attractive view for several reasons. One is that it offers the promise of avoiding some of the prob-
lems of dualism without lapsing into materialist reductionism. Another is that it provides a way of viewing
reality as an ordered system of substances distinguished in point of various ‘hylomorphic’ (hyle = matter,
morphe = form) relationships. This is part of what appealed to the medievals, but it was also to prove a
source of problems and disagreements, and even contributed to the decline of scholasticism in the renais-
sance. One set of problems concerns the compatibility of the Aristotelian view with the theological doctrines
listed above. If the soul stands to the body as the shape stands to the paper, then it seems to make no sense to
say that the soul is a something in itself which can survive the body. Bonaventure’s view is interesting in
this respect since he tries unsuccessfully to combine the hylomorphism of the De Anima with the dualism of
Augustine’s De Quantitate Aniniae. He claims that a living human being is indeed a composite of form
(soul) and matter (flesh): ‘The rational soul is the principle and form of the human body’ (Super Libros
Sententiarum, 18); but he insists that the soul is itself a hylomorphic union, in this case of spiritual form and
spiritual matter. The effort to combine dualistic and hylomorphic perspectives is to some degree present in
almost all medieval writers of the thirteenth century and is sometimes spoken of as the ‘Augustinian /
Aristotelian synthesis’.
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Aquinas, who explicitly criticizes the notion of spiritual matter, goes further in the direction of Aristotle and
away from dualism; yet he also claims that the soul, though the form of the body, is nonetheless a subsistent,
if incomplete, entity (a hoc aliquid). Although it is difficult to make sense of, his view merits greater consid-
eration than it has so far received from non-scholastic philosophers. Such consideration would do well to
begin with the idea that as a separable subject the soul is no more than the locus of non-sensory mental acts;
it is not a subject in the post-Cartesian sense of being a person. As Aquinas has it, ‘Anima mea non est ego’
– ‘my soul is not I’ (Commentarium Super Epistolas Pauli Apostoli (1 Cor.: 15)). On the one hand Aquinas
is appreciative of the difficulties with dualism and the empirical and philosophical considerations supporting
a monistic view of persons. On the other hand he believes that persons are essentially psychological beings
and that thought is a non-organic activity. Like his predecessors he associates the nature of human beings as
living thinking individuals with their possession of rational souls, but he takes from Aristotle the idea that
the soul is a form. Hence even if, unlike other forms, it is a subsistent entity it is incomplete in itself. In
short, a human person is a psychophysical substance, and a separable soul is not a person but a minimal
subject.

In working out his views, Aquinas was steering a course between a number of opposing positions. Set
against Augustinian dualism was a form of radical Aristotelianism known, after the Arab commentator, as
Averroism. The main medieval proponent of this was Siger of Brabant (1224-82), a contemporary of
Aquinas. The Averroists were concerned with remarks in De Anima where Aristotle appears to suggest that
the aspects of the soul that empower human beings with thought (the active and passive intellects) are a
single universal principle, that, in effect, there is but one mind distributed through many bodies. Aquinas
attacks this idea (‘Mono-psychism’) in his De Unitate Intellectus Contra Averroistas, insisting that since
reason belongs to the soul and the soul is the form of the human body there are as many intellects as there
are human beings.

While the Averroists sought to posit a single universal soul others argued that each human being has several
souls, i.e. several organizing forms: the vegetative, the sentient and the rational. Versions of this view were
held by the Jewish philosopher Avicebron (1020-70) and later by Ockham (Quodlibet 2). Again Aquinas
argues against it on the grounds that it is at odds with what common sense and philosophy teach, i.e. that
each human being is a unity, neither an instance of a universal intellect nor a collection of individuals.
Belatedly he takes issue with those who view the rational soul as something added to an existing living
being, and with those who believe that it emerges naturally out of matter having been transmitted through
sexual reproduction. The former position might be termed ‘dualist creationism’, the latter is known as
‘traducianism’. What Aquinas himself offers is a version of creationism – rational souls are not naturally
generated – but one in which of the act of creation is the imposition by God of a single soul possessed of
vegetative, sentient and rational powers upon embryonic matter (Summa Contra Gentiles, II, 86).

RENAISSANCE HUMANISM

One may wonder about the philosophical stability of Aquinas’s moderate Aristotelianism. Certainly in sub-
sequent centuries writers tended to move away from it in the directions of either less or more naturalistic
views. In the renaissance period the former tendency was associated with the revival of neo-Platonism and
in particular with the main figures of the Florentine Academy such as Marsilius Ficinus (1433-99) who
translated Plato and Plotinus and whose philosophical psychology involves a deliberate return to the
Christian dualism of St Augustine (Theologia Platonica).

During the lifetime of Ficinus, Aristotle’s De Anima was re-translated at least twice and this prompted
renewed interest in the views of pre-medieval commentators with the result that there was a revival of
Averroism, particularly at the University of Padua, and of Alexandrism. The latter view takes its name from
Alexander of Aphrodisias (f. 200) a commentator whose account of De Anima is free of the dualistic aspects
associated with the Augustinian / Aristotelian synthesis. The main renaissance Alexandrist was Pietro
Pomponazzi (1462-1525) who argued for a position not unlike that of some present-day property dualists.
For while he accepted that thought is a non-physical process he denied that this implied that the subject of
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thought is anything other than a living and mortal human being (De Immortalitate Animae). This view put
him at odds with the declarations of the Church which, during the Fifth Lateran Council (1513), denounced
Averroism and Alexandrism and proclaimed that individual immortality is philosophically demonstrable –
just the issue which in the medieval period had divided Aquinas, Scotus and Ockham.

The renaissance trend towards naturalism led in due course to the kind of empirical approach that laid the
basis both for materialism and for Descartes’ separation of the philosophy of mind from the natural science
of living bodies. Equally, though, as was seen earlier, one can view Cartesianism as a revival of the Platonic-
Augustinean tradition. Either way it emerges out of a rich and complex past, the study of which promises to
yield historical and philosophical insights.
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BIBLIOGRAPHY

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 Cassirer, E., Kristeller, P., and Randall Jr., J. (editors) (1948)
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 Copleston, F.C. (1972)
A History of Medieval Philosophy
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 Haldane, E., and Ross, G. (editors) (1912)
The Philosophical Works of Descartes, Vol. II
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Medieval and renaissance ethics
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Philosophy in the Middle Ages
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 Kenny, A., (editor) (1970)
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Aquinas
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 Kenny, A. (1993)
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 Kirwan C. (1989)
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 Kretzman, N., Kenny, A., and Pinborg, J. (editors) (1982)
The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy
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 Schmitt, C, and Skinner, Q. (editors) (1988)
The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy
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Article in book
Samuel Guttenplan
A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind
Blackwell, Publishing, 1994-95