Intellect and intellectual activity in Buridan's psychology

Jack Zupko

pp. 183-192

in: Gyula Klíma (ed), Questions on the soul by John Buridan and others, Berlin, Springer, 2017

Abstract

Zupko's chapter deals with transduction, the cognitive psychology of the transmission of sensory information for intellectual processing. This theory mentions three kinds of mental acts: understanding (intelligere), believing (credere), and attending to (se convertere ad). We can understand, or think, only one thought at a time, but that thought can be about more than one thing at the same time. Buridan does not offer an account of the compositionality of thoughts (intellectiones) distinct from his theory of the compositionality of propositions in logic. He also says that the intellect trades in beliefs (opiniones), which must belong to a different species than thoughts if we are to maintain any principled distinction between occurrent and dispositional states of the intellect. What he does not offer in q. 16 is an account of how dispositions belonging to one species can cause occurrent thoughts belonging to another, different species. Finally, the act of attention is presented in terms of the intellect turning on itself, that is, reflexive thought.

Cited authors

Buridan Jean