Francesco Binotto

I am currently a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Parma (Italy) where I am carrying on a project on Hervaeus Natalis’s theory of knowledge. In 2023 I received a postdoctoral scholarship funded by the University of Fribourg (Switzerland) for a project on Hervaeus Natalis’s De materia caeli. In 2022-2023 I was Mellon Fellow at the Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies (Toronto, Canada).

Abstract: The Dominican master Hervaeus Natalis (d. 1323) was an original thinker who played a key role in the early fourteenth-century debates on the mechanisms of human knowledge. Hervaeus developed a theory of mental representation based on the distinction between the thing that is cognized and the relation the thing bears on the mind that is actually cognizing it. Our mind cognizes through mental representations, namely concepts. Yet, cognizing things through mental representations does not amount to cognizing mental representations. Hervaeus maintains that the extramental thing is the moving object of knowledge (obiectum movens), while the end-product of each cognitive process (obiectum terminans) is internal to the mind itself, that is to say, it is a mental object which is portrayed as what corresponds to a mental representation.

My research project aims to provide a comprehensive reconstruction of Hervaeus’s account of human cognitive process by focusing on the role played by concepts. This will allow me to clarify (i) the relationship between extramental things, mental objects, and concepts, and (ii) the meaning of the crucial notion of “being objectively in the intellect (esse obiective in intellectu)”. In order to achieve this objective, I will not confine myself to consider his Treatise on Second Intentions, but I also plan to extend my analysis to other works by Hervaeus, such as his Sentences Commentary and his Tractatus De Verbo.