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(2017) The language of thought in late medieval philosophy, Dordrecht, Springer.
Representionalism is a relatively recent philosophical and historiographical category, but the reality that it refers to has a long history. The Scottish philosopher and psychologist William Hamilton (1788–1856) introduced this historico-philosophical notion on the basis of a distinction between two types of cognition: a "presentative, intuitive, or immediate" cognition and a "representative or mediate" cognition. According to Hamilton, this distinction is the same as the medieval distinction between "intuitive cognition" (cognitio intuitive) and "abstractive cognition" (cognitio abstractiva) found in Durand of Saint-Pourçain and the "scholastics." This chapter shows that these two types of cognition, picked up by Charles Sanders Pierce at the beginning of the twentieth century in his article "Representionalism" in James Baldwin's dictionary (1902), correspond to the two senses of "Vorstellung" in Brentano and Husserl (Anschauung, intuition, and Repräsentation, re-presentation) and thus unlike the difference between "presentation" and "representation" that tends to prevail in French and English analytic philosophy today. To clarify the status of the "dittography of (re)representation," I suggest that the medieval distinction is not reducible to the distinction between the transitive transparency and opaque reflexivity of the sign in the classical theory of representation (Port Royal).
Publication details
DOI: 10.1007/978-3-319-66634-1_25
Full citation:
de Libera, A. (2017)., Présentation et représentation: aux origines du "représentationnalisme", in J. Pelletier & M. Roques (eds.), The language of thought in late medieval philosophy, Dordrecht, Springer, pp. 417-435.
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