He's faculty in the same department of the same university in which I'm a graduate student, and I hadn't come across it yet; in fairness, it's a bit department, and I don't generally go searching for faculty webpages. But Clark Goble recently mentioned Peter King's webpage as a resource, so I thought I'd pass it along, too. He has a lot of papers online. Especially recommended (they're PDF):
* Duns Scotus on Powers, Possibility, and the Possible
* Augustine on the Impossibility of Teaching
* Scholasticism and the Philosophy of Mind: The Failure of Aristotelian Psychology - this is a good paper, but in my amateur opinion, I'm not so certain that Aristotelian psychology did fail; at least, one can easily find discussions by psychologists that are suspiciously similar. I'm also not convinced that the transduction problem is any more of a problem for Aristotelian psychology than any other psychology; and I'm not convinced that it played any actually significant role in the rise of early modern psychological projects. (I'm also unconvinced by his argument on the agent intellect and the distinction between sensing and understanding; I just don't see any real problem there, although I might be missing something.) In the interests of full disclosure, I tend to think Aristotelian psychology was, at least in a general way, on the right track, so I have a bias. But it's a great, thought-provoking paper.
* Anselm's Intentional Argument, although I think if King were right about what he thinks is the weak point in Anselm's ontological argument, the ontological argument would be relentlessly successful; I don't think most people can deny coherence to 'that than which no greater can be thought' without being disingenuous, since most people can't actually see anything in such a description that is plausibly incoherent (in phrases of similar construction that do lead to paradoxes people usually have to be shown the paradox to recognize any incoherence in the phrase, and even then it's not always clear that the paradox is due to original incoherence rather than something else), and the analogy with degrees of heat is not, I think, a good argument, for reasons I will perhaps blog about at some point. I prefer Gyula Klima's interpretation here and here. Klima's interpretation actually allows for Anselm's argument being sound and (some) atheistic rejections of the argument being reasonable. It has some similarities with King's analysis of the problem with the argument, but it recognizes more clearly both the problems the atheist faces in rejecting the argument and the latent complexity and difficulties of this apparently simple but actually very difficult and complex argument. In other words, it gives a clearer recognition of the real power and the real difficulties of the argument. But then, I think Gyula Klima's the cat's meow (he's my favorite scholar of medieval philosophy), so I might be biased here, too.
