Modelling Premodern Theories of Mind

Models play a role not only in scientific reasoning, but also in philosophical theory-building. But their role remains largely unacknowledged, leaving unarticulated models to control the shape of debates from the background. Historians of philosophy, Therese Cory suggests, have an especially important role to play in bringing to light the extent to which models inform philosophical thinking—not only in comparing sources, but also in illuminating the extent to which the models of the present are implicitly dominating readings of texts from the past. In this presentation, she considers the case of "modeling the mind" and shows how the widespread use of visual, tactile, and containment imagery has been an impediment to understanding a group of philosophical thinkers from late antiquity into medieval Scholasticism, who adopted what she calls a "metaphysical model of mind."