The aim of the paper is to critically evaluate, from the perspective of a Teresian scholar, Christia Mercer’s claim that Teresa of Ávila’s Interior Castle must have had a substantial influence upon Descartes’ Meditations on the First Philosophy. The paper considers three major topics: (a) the distinction between meditation and contemplation which is crucial in Teresa’s thought and is also crucial for correct evaluation of possible Teresian influence on Descartes; (b) the role of doubts and demon deceivers for both authors and (c) Descartes’ reading list and his relationship with the Jesuits. Mercer’s line of argument is shown to be wanting, her methodological approach flawed and her “arguments” disclosed as speculations at best. In the end I come to the conclusion that Mercer’s claim is unsubstantiated and should be dismissed as such.

Besides other works on logic, Richard Billingham (fl. 1340–1360) authored a collection of ca. fifty sophisms entitled Conclusiones. The text is preserved in (at least) five complete and two incomplete copies from between the late fourteenth and late fifteenth centuries. Most of the sophisms relate to doxastic and epistemic logic, and thus to the late-medieval genre de scire et dubitare, which originated in Britain around 1330. The paper offers the parallel lists of sophisms preserved in all currently known copies of the text, outlines some of the general issues (such as theory of validity and the text’s relation to probationes propositionum), and presents a critical edition of a sample of the epistemic sophisms preserved in the text.

The Swedish Lutheran theologian and bishop Johannes Rudbeckius (1581–1646) formulated twelve arguments for the immortality of the soul in two distinct but interrelated dissertations, De animae immortalitate and Propositiones de animae humanae immortalitate, debated respectively in November 1611 in Uppsala and in September 1626 in Västerås. I present the arguments and discuss them critically. Further, I demonstrate that Rudbeckius’s source for his discussion is the commentary on Aristotle’s De anima written by the Jesuit philosopher and theologian Franciscus Toletus (1532–1596), first published in Venice in 1574. Finally, I take up a dissertation authored by Rudbeckius’s student Olaus Gabrielis Felstadius (ca 1590 – ca 1620), De origine et immortalitate animae, debated in June 1611 in Uppsala. Felstadius’s treatment is also shown to be dependent on Toletus’s commentary.

The paper addresses the collection of (broadly speaking) epistemic sophisms discussed in the Heytesburian treatise traditionally referred to as “Probationes conclusionum” and strives to fulfil four tasks based on analyses of its manuscripts: first, to suggest a new, or rather the original title for the text, namely “Conclusiones” (which, in this context, means “Sophisms”); second, to argue in favour of its authenticity by refuting the arguments for the opposite and showing that positive arguments applied to other texts (such as Sophismata asinina) apply to it as well; third, to outline the content of the chapter on epistemic sophisms and compare its topics with those addressed in Regulae solvendi sophismata; and fourth, to present a commented critical edition of two of the sophisms.

The paper argues that René Descartes developed his own version of an older scholastic (un-Hobbesian) doctrine by undermining a key element on which all previous participants of the debate had agreed. Namely, all the relevant early modern authors before Descartes (whether scholastics, Hobbes, or others) agreed that laughter must be an expression of joy in one form or another. The proposed interpretation thus challenges the idea that the so-called superiority theory prevailed in seventeenth-century philosophy. It stresses the significance of the scholastic tradition while at the same time pointing out Descartes’ specific and original position in the debate.

The present essay considers the metaphysical thought of the late scholastic Jesuit Antonio Pérez (1599–1649). In particular, attention is given to his argument for God’s existence which is presented along the lines of an ontological argument broadly construed. Pérez’s formulation of the argument is unique in that it is framed in such a way that it denies that God is a chimera. If God is not a chimera, then God is not nothing, which is to say God is something. To speak of chimeras and impossible objects is to move beyond the realm of real being. In fact, Pérez thinks that real being itself can be defined by a larger genus of being, namely, intentional being. Indeed, as he says, intentional being is communior than even real being itself. I suggest, then, that what functions as the backdrop of Pérez’s argument is the notion of supertranscendentality. Though he does not use the term as such, the notion of supertranscendentality is now developed in such a way that it yields a proof for God’s existence.

This paper argues that the four elements exist in different ways in mixtures and homogenous parts of substances. According to Aristotle’s definition in De caelo, the elements exist in virtue of themselves in the compound bodies which they compose. However, if we assume that they exist in the same way in hylomorphic compounds as they exist in the compound bodies which they directly compose, a discrepancy arises between Aristotle’s definition of element and his hylomorphic theory, because the elements cannot exist potentially, on the one hand, as the elements themselves, and, on the other hand, as the matter of a hylomorphic compound, at the same time. To solve this problem, homogenous bodies have been distinguished into mixtures and homogenous parts of hylomorphic individuals. According to Aristotle, it is only in mixtures that the elements exist in potentiality, while in the formation of the homogenous parts of a new substance generated from the mixtures, the elements which exist in the mixture are destroyed so that they can no longer exist in the hylomorphic compounds as themselves.

The purpose of this paper is to propose and defend what I take to be the correct reading of the phrase non tantum… sed… as it is used by Duns Scotus. I identify two possible interpretations of the phrase — the Additive Interpretation and the Intensive Interpretation — and argue that the latter is correct. Then I analyse three occurrences of this construction in Scotus’s writing and show how misinterpreting it will lead and, in two of these cases, actually has lead to an erroneous understanding of a crucial passage in Scotus.

The seventeenth-century Spanish Dominican Cosme de Lerma authored numerous philosophical works, some ofwhich were posthumously reorganised into a Cursus philosophicus, intended as an arts course for the Dominican studia in Italy. Lerma’s philosophical project consisted in developing the doctrines proposed a century earlier by his fellow Dominican friar Domingo de Soto. Through analysing Lerma’s Compendium and Disputationes based on Soto’s Summulae and Lerma’s Commentaries on Aristotle’s Logic, this paper explores three issues: first, Lerma’s axiomatic theory of inference, including the development of Soto’s project of relevance logic (relating to the analysis of the paradoxes of implication); second, the question whether there are different degrees of validity (answered negatively by Lerma); third, Lerma’s psychology of inference, which offers an interpretation of human inferential behaviour and its limitations in terms of the scholastic theories of causation and natural agency.

For Suárez, the general notion of efficient causality and the reality of it are known not through an abstraction from supposed “primitive” experiences of connection between causes and effects but indirectly, through a reasoning that begins with what is directly observed and ends with the evidence that it is really in the things themselves. In this paper, I intend to show the plausibility of this interpretation in the following way: first, I will quickly present a passage in which Suárez claims that efficient causality is evident; second, I will show in which sense the principle “nothing can transfer itself from nonbeing to being” has an empirical basis; and, third, I will show how the reality of efficient causation among things of the empirical world can be demonstrated from the experience of a rational order in them.