Simon Kemp, Cognitive Psychology in the Middle Ages

As the title indicates, this short book is intended to summarize the medieval contribution to what is now commonly referred to as cognitive psychology— " the psychology of how we acquire, process, and remember information about the world " (p. 1). The book focuses on developments that occurred in the Latin West with the recovery of Aristotle's De Anima in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries and the influx of Muslim philosophical treatises around the same time. The central chapters deal with the reception of Avicenna's physiological theory of the inner senses (chapter 4), and medieval debates surrounding the nature and implications of intellectual cognition (chapter 5). The other chapters, which are largely subordinate to these two, provide some necessary historical background (chapters 1-3), discuss certain areas of inquiry in which medieval cognitive theories figured prominently (chapter 6), and compare medieval cognitive theories with those developed by contemporary academic psychologists (chapter 7). The book is written in a non-technical style, and is intended " to be comprehensible to someone who knows a little about present-day psychological thinking " (p. 2). Although this book contains a number of serious flaws, which I shall discuss below, it has the virtue of being well organized and well conceived. Kemp's decision to focus on the later part of the Middle Ages makes good sense, and his chapter on the inner senses is by far the best in the book. In this chapter, Kemp provides a useful introduction to medieval physiology of the brain, and then uses this to describe the various psychological processes that different medieval philosophers located in different parts of the brain. His strategy of examining Avicenna's account in detail, and then characterizing other medieval theories in terms of it, is also well motivated. As Kemp points out, Avicenna's account was highly influential in the Latin West (p.