ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book explores three debates drawing upon three influential intellectual traditions that decisively shaped thinking about the mind in the period between 1300 and 1600. The traditions are given as follows: scholastic Aristotelianism and its debates about the mind and soul; humanism and its critique of scholasticism; and Platonism. The book argues that the three movements do not represent mutually exclusive intellectual traditions. This is because these movements are defined by criteria that are partly doctrinal and partly methodological; while Aristotelianism and Platonism are characterized by their distinctive philosophical views, the humanist tradition is marked by its shared interest in the philological, scholarly and rhetorical questions raised by the newly available ancient texts. The most salient Platonist element adopted by many scholastic authors may be the view that the mind is a distinctively active entity that requires radically different explanations than natural phenomena.
