Henry of Ghent’s Doctrine of Analogy: Its Origins and Interpretations

Whoo boy! Feels good to finally finish my Master’s Thesis. If for some reason the preceding post didn’t slake your thirst, you can read the whole thing here:

Henry of Ghent’s Doctrine of Analogy

Let’s all just hope that it passes!

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Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola on the Scholastic Masters

Our evaluations of the relative importance of the scholastics and not always the same as the evaluations of the scholastic masters themselves. Here is a quote from the Italian renaissance humanist Giovanni Pico Della Mirandola‘s Oration on the Dignity of Man:

Henry of Ghent and John Duns Scotus on the Formal Distinction

I’m currently writing on Henry of Ghent and soon I’m going to start looking at Scotus’s interpretation of him, so I found the following quote very interesting:

“If I am not mistaken, the precise difference between Scotus and Henry boils down to this. If you grant their common scholastic assumption that our concepts and reality are somehow isomorphic, then the mere possibility of conceiving one property without the other requires some actual nonidentity or distinction of properties a parte rei logically prior to and as a condition for our thinking of one apart from the other. (Recall in this connection what Wittgenstein says in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 2.012-2.0121). One can of course deny the isomorphism as Ockham does, but if you concede it as Aquinas and henry do, it seems difficult to escape Scotus’s conclusion.”

Henry of Ghent on Divine Illumination

Henry of Ghent’s works out part of his theory of cognition out in response to the question Can a human being know anything without divine illumination? Like Thomas Aquinas, Henry attempts to synthesize the mechanisms of Aristotle’s theory of cognition with the Augustinian doctrine that true knowledge is beyond the natural capacity of human cognition, requiring a gift of divine illumination, however Henry will argue against Thomas that this illumination must be something other than a natural faculty of the soul.