Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages
Simon Kemp
Greenwood Press
One of the intellectual themes of the Middle Ages is the revolution in 
thinking that was brought about by the discovery and translation into 
Latin of the works of Aristotle and his commentators. An important theme
 of this book is how medieval theorizing about what we today call 
cognitive psychology—that is the psychology of how we acquire, process, 
and remember information about the world—developed as a consequence of 
this discovery. <br> The organization of this book arises from the 
premise that medieval theories shared a number of common features 
deriving from Aristotle and the medical writers. Hence, rather than 
discussing the cognitive theories of each of the many different scholars
 and showing the many ways in which they repeated each other, in general
 I present the framework of a common medieval theory and then discuss 
some of the more interesting deviations from and elaborations on the 
basic model. Similarly, rather than considering all the different 
variations suggested, for the most part I concentrate on 
authors—particularly Avicenna, Averroës, Albertus Magnus, Thomas 
Aquinas, and William of Ockham—who appear to me, as they seem to have 
done to their medieval contemporaries, to have had something different 
and important to say about cognitive psychology.