Introduction
Mental or cognitive faculties (such as the senses, imagination, memory, understanding (or intellect), and will) played a major role in (late) Aristotelian and Renaissance Platonic thought before early modern philosophers began to reconsider the traditional views of the metaphysical structure of the world and our epistemological access to it. Early modern philosophers were often highly critical, and even polemical, toward their predecessors’ metaphysical and epistemological outlook in general and their views of faculties in particular. Despite this, however, virtually all of them talked about mental faculties (in one way or another), and many of them even structured their theories of cognition and epistemology around the discussion of our faculties. At the same time, early modern authors from René Descartes to Thomas Reid held surprisingly diverse views as to what faculties really are, how...
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Schmid, S. (2020). Mental Faculties in Early Modern Philosophy. In: Jalobeanu, D., Wolfe, C. (eds) Encyclopedia of Early Modern Philosophy and the Sciences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20791-9_225-1
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