Paula Oliveira e Silva

Paula Oliveira e Silva is Associate Professor at the Philosophy Department of the University of Porto. Her research is currently focused on 16th-century reception of Aristotle’s theories of knowledge and on the body-mind-soul relationship. While at Notre Dame her research project will be focused on the debates on the nature and functions of the passive intellect and on arguments over the immateriality of the activity of the human mind. Here is a summary of her research project:

The need to build rational arguments to demonstrate the immortality of the human soul, required by the Apostolici Regiminis decree of the Lateran V Council, led philosophy teachers to deepen the analysis of human cognition in order to establish a clear distinction between on the one hand the activity of the intellect that depends on corporeal representations and on the other the appropriation, immanent and immaterial, of mental intentions that depend on those representations. My project will study arguments and theories about this problem, discussed and explained in textbooks containing commentaries on Aristotle's De anima of the 2nd half of the 16th century extant of the teaching of philosophy in Coimbra at the time.

Host: Thérèse Cory