Overview

Richard Cross provides the first complete and detailed account of Duns Scotus's theory of cognition, tracing the processes involved in cognition from sensation, through intuition and abstraction, to conceptual thought. He provides an analysis of the ontological status of the various mental items (acts and dispositions) involved in cognition, and a new account of Scotus on nature of conceptual content. Cross goes on to offer a novel, reductionist, interpretation of Scotus's view of the ontological status of representational content, as well as new accounts of Scotus's opinions on intuitive cognition, intelligible species, and the varieties of consciousness. Scotus was a perceptive but highly critical reader of his intellectual forebears, and this volume places his thought clearly within the context of thirteenth-century reflections on cognitive psychology, influenced as they were by Aristotle, Augustine, and Avicenna. As far as possible, Duns Scotus's Theory of Cognition traces developments in Scotus's thought during the ten or so highly productive years that formed the bulk of his intellectual life.

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9780199684885

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[Cross] is in my mind one of the few who have the ability to make Scotus understandable, clear and philosophically interesting. It is always a delight to pick up one of his books on Scotus. I constantly learn something new. He has now published a new book on Scotus's theory of cognition. It is another very interesting treatment of an important aspect of Scotus's philosophy...It is the clearest and most interesting treatment of Scotus's theory of cognition out there. -- Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Online

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Richard Cross is the John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame. Before that he was Tutorial Fellow in Theology at Oriel College, Oxford from 1993 to 2007, and Professor of Medieval Theology from 2007.

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