Han Thomas Adriaenssen
Fellow, University of Groningen
Late medieval and early modern philosophy of mind and metaphysics
My research focuses on late medieval and early modern philosophy. In my book, Representation and Scepticism from Aquinas to Descartes, I provide a comparative account of late medieval and early modern accounts of cognitive representation, and offer an analysis of the criticism that philosophers from both periods raised against indirect-realist theories of representation. Recently, I have been working on theories of identity and individuation in thinkers such as Pomponazzi, Hobbes, and le Grand. As a fellow of the Human Abilities Centre, I will be studying the debate on agency and causation between the English Cartesian, Antoine le Grand, and his Aristotelian critic, John Sergeant. Also, I intend to explore in more detail the account in Francisco Suárez and later Jesuit thinkers of the individuation of effects: Why does a causal power, at some given place and time, produce this effect rather than a numerically different one of the same kind?