Jordan Lavender

Jordan received his MA From Boston College and his PhD from the University of Notre Dame. He was the Postdoctoral Research Associate in Medieval Philosophy at Purdue University from 2022-2024 and is now an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at Texas A&M University.

Abstract: In the fourteenth century, the scholastic term ‘vital act’ (actus vitalis) acquires a new meaning according to which it picks out all and only states we would call ‘mental’ (including both sensation and thought) to the exclusion of other states associated with biological life, such as locomotion and digestion. The term continues to have this unexpected meaning well into the early modern period. My project identifies this previously unnoticed terminological and conceptual shift and shows that the shift occurred in the early fourteenth century due to the complicated transmission of the Latin translation of Ibn Rushd's Tafsīr Mā ba'd al-ṭabī'a.