13/02/2010

Leuven: Later Medieval Cognitive Theories

I am off to Leuven, Belgium next week for a conference on Later Medieval Cognitive Theories. I will be giving a paper on Henry of Ghent's (seeming) account of a person's being aware of her first-order thoughts, and that she's the subject of these first-order thoughts. It is a complicated mess, textually. In any case, I've done my best to make sense of various and sundry claims. The conference paper comes from material from a chapter of my D.Phil. thesis on the Father's intellectual generation of the Son/Word.

The more I learn about later medieval phil. of mind - the more I am surprised at the diversity of views. Our scholastic friends were kind of like jazz musicians-- give me a riff, and I'll show you a 101 ways to play off of it.