Conferences

I went to two conferences last week. The first was at Notre Dame with the SIEPM (Société Internationale pour l'Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale) , on "Philosophy and Theology in the Studia of the Religious Orders and at the Papal Court." Basically, studia were the smaller, religious schools as opposed to the universities. It was very heavy on the history (especially 14th century, where I'm more interested in 13th century though), and so I was lot for a good deal of it. It did rekindle some enthusiasm for a couple days though, which was good; I've been (and currently am) running on pretty much zero motivation, with focus and energy to match.

The second conference was at Marquette, and it was part of the "Aquinas and the Arabs" project. I could follow that one a fair bit more. There was some interesting work done on Aquinas' thought, and particularly on how he borrowed from Arabic sources. Turns out that in his commentary on the Sentences, he pretty much adopts Avicenna's metaphysics, almost down to the terminology; pace Gilson, Aquinas' metaphysic was not a specifically Christian one, although it fit that use nicely. Aquinas' psychology was borrowed first from Avicenna, but he later switched to a more Averroistic one, at least with regard to internal senses.

Père Oliva from the Leonine Commission in Paris (a group working on the critical edition of Aquinas' works) was our guest speaker - a rather soft-spoken, likeable Italian man. He seemed to like what our project is doing, and it sounds like we're going to get a fair bit of money, to run things for a couple decades. So that's pretty cool.

Currently, I'm scrambling to get through secondary sources for my papers. I have one for Aristotle (most likely on the potential intellect, though the logos between sensibles and the senses seems interesting as well), for Plato (assuming my midterm paper did well, I'm analyzing some of Socrates' more pragmatic statements in the Meno), and Medieval Islamic Philosophy (on the epistemology of the rather interesting Persian mystical philosopher Suhrawardi). Unfortunately, I can't focus for the life of me on my studies. Hopefully this will pass before it sinks my grades....