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William of Hedon is the author of
The text is titled
Hedon gives an independent presentation of the soul, but the text still, as is fairly customary in the genre, partially mirrors the structure of Aristotle's text (skipping the historical part of book I). It is split into three
Utrum intellectus seipsum intelligat et qualiter idem contingat esse signum sui et quid contra hoc et ad hoc dici conveniat.
The standard position at this time in the faculty of arts is that the
intellect is only able to know itself once it has been actualized by
an external species, so William presents five arguments against the
possibility of immediate intellectual self-knowledge. Some of the
arguments are commonly known from the commentaries of the arts
faculty, and thus yield interesting suggestions for how that standard
view could be countered. But the most interesting arguments are two
that we do not recognize from the Aristotelian commentaries, and they
handle the epistemological problem of self-knowledge from a logical
perspective. In the first of those, the liar paradox is used to
support the statement that if a part cannot establish knowledge of the
whole, neither can the intellect establish knowledge of itself. The
part-whole relationship is compared to the self-reference in the liar
paradox pointing out that both seem to result in an infinite regress.
The second semantic argument is based on Aristotle's distinction of
words as signs of passions of the soul.
William considers the question of self-knowledge relatively
non-controversial. To him it seems obvious that no one would doubt
that the intellect knows itself, and that it does so without any
dependence on external species. But at some point the liar paradox is
what has really caught his attention. After having resolved the other
initial arguments, he goes into an extended discussion of that
problem, which makes up about half the length of the whole chapter.
The discussion is mostly done with reference to the Aristotelian
logic, where William shows a deep familiarity with the
The use of the liar paradox in the context of psychological
epistemology is in itself interesting, as William apparently has
noticed the alignment of the problem of self-reference within the two
domains. But it is also a testament to the role and weight of the
logical education within the 13th century universities, when, in the
composition of a theologically orientated treatise, an author can
delve into an extended discussion of a logical paradox, that although
it is well known in the
To my knowledge no parts of the text have ever been published. This edition of the chapter on self-knowledge will thus in itself present a real contribution to our knowledge of a text that is virtually unknown. It not only makes available arguments revealing a unique blend of logic and epistemology from the last half of the 13th century, but will cast some light on the writing process and editorial practice of an original, but virtually unknown, author of that period.