All are invited to a Philosophy Department colloquium talk by Professor Antoine Côté from the Department of Philosophy, Universty of Ottawa. The talk will take place on Wednesday 26th March at 1:30 PM in AC04 LR303.

Title: The Demise of the Object as a Cause of Cognition in Late Medieval Philosophy

Abstract: According to a prominent model of cognition in late medieval European philosophy, the object of my knowledge (say, Coriscus, in my knowing that Coriscus is standing in front of me) is the efficient and formal cause of my knowledge. Coriscus stands at the starting point of the process that terminates in my act of knowledge and gives that act its content.

Many medieval philosophers, however, rejected this model, arguing that it granted too great a role to the object and the sense faculties. Instead, they proposed accounts of cognition that made the mind the principal cause of its acts of knowledge. My presentation focuses on one such account: that of the maverick Dominican theologian Durand of Saint-Pourçain.

For Durand and his followers, knowing something is not a matter of the mind’s being acted upon or having information conveyed to it but rather of the mind’s being directed to or related to that object. While indispensable for knowledge to occur, the object does not contribute to its production in any causally robust sense. After spelling out Durand’s position and contrasting it with rival solutions, I gesture at its significance for subsequent theories of cognition.

Speaker Bio: Antoine Côté is a Professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Ottawa. He is interested in all aspects of philosophy in the Long Middle Ages (roughly from Justin Martyr to Leibniz). He works mostly on the metaphysics, theories of cognition, and political philosophy of thirteenth and fourteenth century thinkers. He is currently working on a project focusing on the theory of cognition and the metaphysics of the Benedictine Pierre Roger, who was Master of Theology at the University of Paris from 1323 to 1326.