SECTION A
1. Identify each of the passages (i) and (ii), explain the part it plays in the
argument of the text from which it is taken and supply whatever
background material and interpretative comments a reader now would
need in order to understand its full significance. You may also compare
the two passages.
Passages (i) and (ii) – at end of paper.
2. Identify each of the passages (iii) and (iv), explain the part it plays in the
argument of the text from which it is taken and supply whatever
background material and interpretative comments a reader now would
need in order to understand its full significance. You may also compare
the two passages.
Passages (iii) and (iv) – at end of paper.
SECTION B
3. EITHER (a) ‘Avicenna describes abstraction at length, but does not make
clear what is its role in intellectual cognition.’ Discuss.
OR (b) Analyse the connections Avicenna makes between the idea of
self-awareness and his claim that humans have immaterial intellects.
4. ‘According to Averroes, no individual human being is independently a
thinker. But without humans, thought would be impossible.’ Discuss.
5. EITHER (a) According to Aquinas, the human intellect can receive only
immaterial intelligible species. In what sense, then, are what it
understands material things?
OR (b) ‘Everything is cognizable according to its being in act, not
according to its being in potency’ (AQUINAS). How does this position
explain Aquinas’s theory of self-knowledge, and is the explanation
adequate?
6. How does Gersonides individuate immortal souls? Does he thereby
succeed in giving an account of individual human immortality?
7. ‘…it is not yet transparently clear to me that this knowledge [of myself] is
complete and adequate, so as to enable me to be certain that I am not
mistaken in excluding body from my essence’ (ARNAULD, Fourth
Objections). How well do Descartes’s views, as developed in the
Meditations and in his Responses, allow him to answer this objection?
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8. How does Spinoza use his conception of attributes to develop an account
of the relation between mind and body?
9. ‘There is a way which seemeth just to a man: but the ends thereof lead to
death’ (Proverbs). What limits are suggested by Abelard’s Collationes to
human reason’s ability to reach the truth?
10. How does Averroes use his principle that ‘people’s natures vary in
excellence with respect to assent’ to vindicate Aristotelian philosophy
against its Islamic critics?
11. Maimonides openly declares that there are stronger arguments that the
world has a beginning than that it is eternal. Should we therefore conclude
that this is his view?
12. Is it wrong to describe Boethius of Dacia as a relativist about truth, given
that he acknowledges that Christian doctrine is absolutely true?
13. EITHER (a) How well does Pomponazzi argue that an Aristotelian
understanding of the human soul implies its mortality?
OR (b) Does Pomponazzi propose a coherent ethical theory in On the
Immortality of the Soul?
14. To what extent does Spinoza’s historical examination of the Bible in his
Tractatus Theologico-Politicus make revelation superfluous?
15. With regard to the theme of EITHER (a) thinking and the self, OR (b)
scientific truth and revelation, examine critically the idea of the Long
Middle Ages, by comparing one of the set texts written before 1500 with
one written afterwards.
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PASSAGES
Question 1
i) Return to your self and reflect whether, being whole, or even in another
state, where, however, you discern a thing correctly, you would be
oblivious to the existence of your self (dhātaka) and would not affirm
your self (nafsaka)? To my mind, this does not happen to the
perspicacious – so much so that the sleeper in his sleep and the person
drunk in the state of his drunkenness will not miss knowledge of his
self, even if his presentation of his self to himself does not remain in his
memory.
And if you imagine your self (dhātaka) to have been at its first creation
mature and whole in mind and body and it is supposed to be in a
generality of position and physical circumstance where it does not
perceive its parts, where its limbs do not touch each other but are rather
spread apart, and that this self is momentarily suspended in temperate
air, you will find that it will be unaware of everything except the
“fixedness” (thubūt) of its individual existence (anniyyathihā).
ii) As stated above, a thing is intelligible according as it is in act. Now the
ultimate perfection of the intellect consists in its own operation: for this
is not an act tending to something else in which lies the perfection of
the work accomplished, as building is the perfection of the thing built;
but it remains in the agent as its perfection and act, as is said Metaph.
ix, Did. viii, 8. Therefore the first thing understood of the intellect is its
own act of understanding. This occurs in different ways with different
intellects. For there is an intellect, namely, the Divine, which is Its own
act of intelligence, so that in God the understanding of His intelligence,
and the understanding of His Essence, are one and the same act,
because His Essence is His act of understanding. But there is another
intellect, the angelic, which is not its own act of understanding, as we
have said above, and yet the first object of that act is the angelic
essence. Wherefore although there is a logical distinction between the
act whereby he understands that he understands, and that whereby he
understands his essence, yet he understands both by one and the
same act; because to understand his own essence is the proper
perfection of his essence, and by one and the same act is a thing,
together with its perfection, understood. And there is yet another,
namely, the human intellect, which neither is its own act of
understanding, nor is its own essence the first object of its act of
understanding, for this object is the nature of a material thing. And
therefore that which is first known by the human intellect is an object of
this kind, and that which is known secondarily is the act by which that
object is known; and through the act the intellect itself is known, the
perfection of which is this act of understanding. For this reason did the
Philosopher assert that objects are known before acts, and acts before
powers.
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Question 2
iii) When something pertaining to these interpretations is declared to
someone not adept in them – especially demonstrative interpretations,
due to their remoteness from things about which there is shared
cognizance – both he who declares it and the one to whom it is
declared are steered to unbelief. The reason is that interpretation
includes two things: the rejection of the apparent sense and the
establishing of the interpretation. Thus, if the apparent sense is
rejected by someone who is an adept of apparent sense without the
interpretation being established for him, that leads him to unbelief if it is
about the roots of the Law. So interpretations ought not to be declared
to the multitude, nor established in rhetorical or dialectical books – I
mean, books in which the statements posited are of these two sorts –
Abū Hāmid [al-Ghazāll] did.
For this kind [of people], it is obligatory to declare and to say, with
respect to the apparent sense – when it is such that the doubt as to
whether it is an apparent sense is in itself apparent to everyone, without
cognizance of its interpretation being possible for them – that it is one of
those [verses] that resemble one another [whose interpretation is] not
known, except to God, and that it is obligatory for the stop in His saying
(may He be exalted) to be placed here: “None knows their interpretation
but God”.
iv) We maintain, therefore, that the world is not eternal but was created de
novo, although this cannot be demonstrated by rational arguments, as
we have seen above, as is also true of certain other things which
pertain to faith. If they could be demonstrated, then [faith] would not be
faith but science. Therefore, in defense of the faith sophistical
argumentation should not be advanced, as is evident; nor should
dialectical argumentation, since it does not produce a firm habit but only
opinion, and faith should be stronger than opinion; nor should
demonstrative argumentation, since then faith would extend only to
those things which can be demonstrated.
At this point it is necessary to reply to the arguments offered for both
sides, and first to those which endeavor to prove that which is contrary
to the truth, that is, that the world is coeternal with God.