Grounding in Medieval Philosophy

This book offers a selection of 13 case studies on how the notion of grounding helps illuminate philosophical discussions of our past with a special focus on debates of the Middle Ages. It thereby makes not only the case that the notion of grounding, which has become so widely debated in analytic metaphysics, has a long and venerable tradition, but also shows that this tradition has a lot to teach to contemporary philosophers of grounding. This is because the historical authors discussed in this volume – that is, Aristotle, Fazang, Boethius, Avicenna, Abelard, Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, Buridan, Suárez, Leibniz, and others – suggested different types of non-efficient-causal explanations which are to be carefully distinguished. This volume illustrates how philosophy and history of philosophy can be mutually illuminating by showing that the terminology developed in the contemporary debate about grounding can help reconstruct philosophical discussions from Antiquity up to the Early Modern Period, and that these very discussions enrich, and in part challenge the contemporary debate about grounding. In this vein, it is an important reading for everyone interested in the history of grounding and the philosophical insights that this history might have left to us.

Calvin G. Normore is Brian P. Copenhaver Professor of Philosophy, UCLA, Emeritus Macdonald Professor of Moral Philosophy, McGill University, and Honorary Professor of Philosophy, the University of Queensland. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and former President of the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association. His Ph.D. is in Philosophy from the University of Toronto. He has held  regular academic positions at Princeton, the University of Toronto, and (since 1998) at UCLA and irregular ones  at the University of Alberta, York University, Columbia, U.C. Irvine, the Ohio State University and Yale. From 2008-2011 he also held the William MacDonald Chair of Moral Philosophy at McGill University. He specializes in the History of Philosophy, and works (if you call it work) in such diverse areas as metaphysics, the philosophy of time, political philosophy and logic.

Stephan Schmid is Professor of the History of Philosophy at Universität Hamburg, and Co-Director of the Maimonides Centre of Advanced Studies: Jewish Scepticism. He works on early modern and late medieval philosophy with a particular focus on the work of Suárez, Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz. He is especially interested in questions at the intersection of metaphysics, epistemology and philosophy of mind and is the editor and author of various volumes and articles that have been published with Ergo, Cambridge University Press, De Gruyter, Oxford University Press, Routledge, and Suhrkamp.