A PRC Evening

A PRC Evening

By Isabel Inzunza Gomez

May 2025 – At 6 PM sharp, as the soft light filtered through the windows of the Husserl Archives in KU Leuven, we gathered in the Saloons around a large square table. The chairs were plentiful, but at the center of each side sat the evening’s presenters: Professor Paul Richard Blum, who introduced Jesuit und Neuzeit: Diskursarchäologische Streifzüge in die Philosophiegeschichte by Sven K. Knebel, and Professor Rebecca Copenhaver alongside Dr. Boaz Faraday Schuman, who presented Maria Rosa Antognazza’s posthumous book Thinking with Assent. At the fourth side, Professor Andrea Robiglio presided—not only guiding the discussion with his characteristic mix of wit and erudition, but also, as always, supplying a bottle of Franciacorta to encourage both rigor and conviviality. This was the latest meeting of the Philosophical Review Club, better known as the PRC.

The PRC, founded by Professor Robiglio, is an informal reading and review group designed for PhD students and early career scholars at KU Leuven’s Institute of Philosophy. Less a seminar and more a scholarly salon, its guiding principle is simple: that good writing begins with better reading, and that reading, like thinking, should be done in good company. Each month, one or two members present an in-depth review of a recently published work in their area of specialization, distributed in advance and then subjected to constructive discussion during the session. The goal is not just to critique, but to improve—to turn reading notes into publishable review articles.

The results speak for themselves. Since its founding, the PRC has produced over 70 peer-reviewed publications, nearly half authored by junior scholars. The review presented this past Friday, May 16th, is already slated for submission to the Freiburger Zeitschrift für Philosophie und Theologie. A book commemorating the PRC is forthcoming as well, featuring contributions from luminaries such as Pietro Boitani and Carlo Ginzburg.

Paul Richard Blum opened the evening with a sharp and engaging presentation of Jesuit und Neuzeit: Diskursarchäologische Streifzüge in die Philosophiegeschichte by Sven K. Knebel—a dense, polemical, and often provocative collection of essays seeking to excavate the neglected conceptual contributions of Jesuit scholasticism to early modern philosophy. The volume, Blum noted, is not a traditional monograph but a curated assemblage of eight essays (two previously unpublished) that move through topics ranging from epistemology and judgment theory to metaphysics, divine cognition, and moral theology.

Blum began with a personal anecdote: as a young scholar in Berlin in the 1980s, he once gave a talk defending the value of Jesuit and Dominican scholastic philosophy, only to be told by a skeptical analytic philosopher that what he had just presented was “not really philosophy.” At the time, Knebel had insisted he should have shown how these scholastics “prepared the way” for Descartes and Locke. Blum demurred then—and continues to do so now. His guiding principle, echoed in Knebel’s work, is that we should attempt to understand these thinkers on their own terms rather than retroactively turning them into precursors of later “heroes” in a Whiggish narrative.

The book’s first chapters explore themes such as doxastic voluntarism—the idea, rooted in figures like Robert Holcot, that the will plays a constitutive role in belief formation—and the so-called “perception theory of judgment” in Gabriel Vázquez. Here, Knebel traces early modern debates about whether judgment is an act of the intellect tied to the perception of logical relations between subject and predicate, a view that eventually enabled the fusion of epistemology with logic.

One of the most intriguing parts of the presentation focused on Knebel’s reading of Suárez and the notion of virtual reflection—the idea that reflexivity in thought need not involve a second act, but may be implicit in the original cognitive act itself. Blum highlighted how this idea creates a bridge between medieval scholastic theories of thinking and Descartes’s cogito. While Knebel does not claim direct historical causation, he implies that the conceptual architecture of the Jesuits helped make the cogito thinkable. The discussion touched on Aristotle’s theory of self-awareness in De Anima and traced its transformation in early modern scholastic debates. One attendee noted that if thinking is already reflexive in a single act, it would resist even Descartes’ hypothetical evil deceiver—a point Blum acknowledged as philosophically promising.

Further chapters examined Jesuit perspectives on the temporality of cognition—especially in the writings of Sebastián Izquierdo—exploring how human temporal thinking might be preserved or transformed in the beatific vision and divine eternity. This led to a broader reflection on the Augustinian distinction between temporal and eternal modes of being, and whether thinking continues after death in a temporally extended way or as a single eternal “flash.” Blum’s reply emphasized the theological challenges of articulating such concepts within metaphysical frameworks that span finitude and infinity.

Chapter by chapter, Blum guided us through Knebel’s discourse archaeology—an approach influenced by Foucault that resists grand narratives and focuses instead on the historically situated vocabularies, interests, and argumentative patterns of lesser-known thinkers. However, Blum also raised several criticisms. He noted Knebel’s polemical tone, his sometimes ungenerous treatment of historians like Ernst Cassirer, and his curious neglect of contemporary scholars who have contributed substantially to the historiography of Jesuit philosophy—such as Ugo Baldini, Wilhelm Schmidt-Biggemann, and Riccardo Quinto. The book’s syntax, Blum warned, is “convoluted German,” and reading it “requires a pencil just to keep track of the verb and the subject”—though he admitted some passages reward the effort.

As for the book’s title, Jesuit und Neuzeit, Blum pointed out that it provocatively juxtaposes rather than integrates its two terms, treating them almost as mutually exclusive concepts. The introduction reads less like a methodological preamble and more like a lament about modernity’s neglect of scholasticism. Knebel’s real achievement, Blum argued, lies not in overturning that neglect with bombast but in reconstructing the conceptual scaffolding of thinkers too often consigned to the margins of philosophical history. Whether or not the book succeeds in its framing, it certainly provokes serious reflection on what counts as philosophy—and who gets to decide.

Blum concluded with a favorite quote from Vázquez, offered perhaps as a quiet rejoinder to Knebel’s polemics: “In communication, it is the listener’s perspective, not the speaker’s, that matters most.” It was a fitting reminder that historical reconstruction—like philosophical dialogue—requires more than just good arguments. It demands attention, humility, and an openness to being surprised by the past.

As the applause for Blum’s presentation settled and the room paused to gather thoughts, the atmosphere subtly shifted—from the polemical terrain of Knebel’s scholastic excavation to the more intimate, yet no less ambitious, landscape of contemporary epistemology. Taking her place at the table, Rebecca Copenhaver introduced the second work of the evening: Maria Rosa Antognazza’s Thinking with Assent.

Reflecting on her early interactions with Antognazza—who warmly welcomed her as a young graduate student in Aberdeen—Copenhaver conveyed a sense of gratitude and admiration that framed her reading of the book. Thinking with Assent, published posthumously, is an ambitious and original synthesis that spans epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. “Only she could have written this book,” Copenhaver remarked, praising its historical depth and conceptual clarity.

At the heart of Antognazza’s project lies a radical disjunctivism: knowledge and belief are not continuous states, as is often assumed, but fundamentally distinct modes of cognition. Knowledge, in her account, is primitive, direct, and non-propositional. It arises through cognitive contact—whether in sense perception, intellectual insight, or, more controversially, imagination. Belief, by contrast, is what happens when knowledge is unavailable. It is mediated, probabilistic, and grounded in reasons that are extrinsic to the object of belief. Antognazza thus rejects the mainstream epistemological formula that knowledge is “justified true belief,” calling this a misconstrued legacy that Plato himself would not have endorsed.

Copenhaver offered a precise and sympathetic exposition of this framework before pivoting to her own area of expertise: philosophy of mind. Here, she respectfully diverged from Antognazza’s position. While Antognazza endorses a relationalist form of intentionality—arguing that intentional states are intrinsically relational and require the co-presence of subject and object—Copenhaver defended a representationalist alternative. Representationalism, she argued, can preserve much of Antognazza’s framework while relaxing the metaphysical requirement of presence. On this view, subjects are directly aware of objects, but such awareness need not entail their actual existence or co-presence in space and time. Memory, imagination, and hallucination, for instance, offer cognitive access to things that are not present without reducing those experiences to mere error or illusion.

This disagreement—relationalism versus representationalism—is, as Copenhaver noted, “endemic and intractable” in the philosophy of mind. Yet she insisted it was not trivial. The debate cuts to a foundational distinction between two ways of approaching the relation between consciousness and the world: one that prioritizes direct contact, and another that prioritizes representational structure. Antognazza, for her part, anchors her relationalist epistemology in a form of naturalism—defining humans as a species of perceiving beings naturally attuned to their environment. But Copenhaver suggested that representationalists are naturalists too. The difference lies in how each tradition relates phenomenological description to scientific explanation. While Antognazza separates them into two distinct projects, representationalists tend to see them as parts of a unified inquiry.

Despite their divergence, Copenhaver closed with admiration for Antognazza’s framework. She praised its alternative to ”Justice To Belief” (JBT) epistemology, its nuanced taxonomy of doxastic states, and its bold re-centering of acquaintance as the foundation of cognition. The presentation, though critical, was an eloquent tribute to a scholar whose legacy continues to shape both historical and contemporary debates in philosophy.

Boaz Faraday Schuman’s response followed seamlessly, though with a tone distinct from Copenhaver’s: more irreverent, more rhetorical, but no less incisive. Where Copenhaver’s exposition was analytic and carefully delineated, Schuman’s was performative—a philosophical monologue delivered with the intensity of a preacher and the wit of a seasoned debater.

He began by listing “three interesting and false claims,” each drawn from the epistemological orthodoxy Antognazza targets: that knowledge is justified true belief; that belief and knowledge differ only in degree, not kind; and that Gettier’s 1963 paper shattered a long-standing consensus on the nature of knowledge. “These are not just false,” Schuman argued, “they are demonstrably false—and they’ve been wasting our time for sixty years.”

His tone, though polemical, was also pedagogical. He patiently walked the room through the canonical tripartite model of knowledge: S knows that P if and only if P is true, S believes that P, and S has justification for P. It is a model so ubiquitous in contemporary epistemology that it risks being mistaken for timeless truth. But, Schuman insisted, it is neither timeless nor true. He revisited Gettier’s now-famous counterexamples—especially the one involving a mistaken perception of a sheep in a field—to show that justified true belief does not suffice for knowledge. But then he pivoted: “And here’s the twist. Everyone thinks Gettier blew up the tradition. But what if there was no such tradition to begin with?”

Antognazza’s book, he explained, reveals that JTB was never the consensus view across the history of philosophy. Plato rejected it. Aristotle distinguished knowledge from belief on ontological grounds. Kant reversed the hierarchy but preserved the distinction. Even the skeptics agreed with the basic disjunctivism, denying knowledge precisely because they accepted that it required a form of direct contact that was unattainable.

This is the heart of Antognazza’s intervention: to reclaim knowledge as something sui generis—something primitive, non-inferential, and non-propositional. Schuman likened it to seeing. “You don’t believe that you’re seeing,” he said. “You just see. In the same way, you don’t believe something you know. You know it. You’re compelled by the object itself.” Belief, by contrast, is inferential. It is assent in the absence of direct contact—formed through reasons, signs, and testimony.

One of Schuman’s most provocative claims was that knowledge and belief are not just different; they are mutually exclusive. “To say ‘I know P and I believe P’,” he quipped, “is like saying ‘I see it, but I’m still guessing’.” This, he argued, was not a linguistic subtlety but a metaphysical shift: knowledge and belief are different cognitive stances, and their conflation has led to endless epistemological confusion.

In this light, Antognazza’s historical survey becomes not mere historiography, but intellectual archeology. The recovery of the knowledge-belief distinction from Plato to Aquinas to Kant is not an antiquarian exercise—it is a corrective. And her relational epistemology, centered on direct acquaintance, offers an alternative to what Schuman called “the sterile calculus of post-Gettier epistemology.”

But the most daring moment of the presentation came when Schuman turned to faith. If belief is no longer treated as botched knowledge, but as a legitimate and independent mode of cognition, then faith—often dismissed as epistemically second-rate—can be revalued. Drawing on Antognazza’s final chapters, Schuman outlined a Thomistic-Augustinian account of faith as belief rooted in authority and propelled by hope. “Faith isn’t trying to be knowledge,” he said. “It’s trying to be faithful. And that’s an act of will, not of vision.”

Throughout, Schuman returned to Antognazza’s central philosophical ethic: give belief its due. Belief, he reminded us, is not epistemic failure—it is the condition of most human thought. From scientific hypotheses to everyday trust, belief mediates our epistemic world. Knowledge, while powerful, is rare. But belief is everywhere.

As the audience leaned forward, captivated by the dialectical fervor, Schuman closed with a paradox. “Thinking with assent is not thinking that sees clearly—it’s thinking that commits, despite the shadows.” A fitting tribute to a thinker who, as he reminded us, wrote this book in the shadow of a terminal illness, racing time to deliver a philosophical legacy that might help us think better—not only with clarity, but with courage.

The discussion that followed Schuman’s presentation was as spirited and far-reaching as his talk itself. If the first half of the evening had been intellectually dense, the second half unfolded more like a philosophical jazz session—each comment improvising on the last, circling the central themes of Antognazza’s book while drawing them into wider orbits.

The first to speak was Oxford professor Howard Hotson—the husband of the late Maria Rosa Antognazza—who offered warm praise for the session’s presenters and for the clarity they had brought to a complex text. “In London,” he noted, referencing a recent book launch at King’s College, “everyone was enthusiastic, but no one stopped to explain what the book was about. Here, in this old European university, with its stubborn regard for tradition, we’ve managed to do something better.” His remarks struck a chord. Several others nodded in agreement as he underscored the historical dimension of Antognazza’s intervention—not just as a correction of Gettier-era assumptions, but as a reclamation of a transhistorical consensus that had quietly endured across metaphysical, theological, and even skeptical traditions: the distinction between knowledge and belief.

The audience also included senior scholars from the Catholic University of Milan—Antognazza’s alma mater—and the University of Malta, who joined the lively debate alongside the PRC’s usual mix of Leuven doctoral researchers and faculty.

This observation segued into a broader reflection on naturalism. If truth is restricted to propositions, the speaker warned, then knowledge becomes the sole property of mature language users. Antognazza’s account, by contrast, made room for animals, children, and pre-conceptual knowers—a gesture both epistemologically generous and politically significant.

A second thread emerged around the communicability of knowledge. One attendee, gesturing toward the epistemology of testimony and revelation, asked whether communication itself might be a condition of knowledge—especially in cases of faith. Schuman and Copenhaver responded in tandem. Testimony, Schuman agreed, cannot in itself generate knowledge—but it can guide us toward experiences that do. He cited the example of viewing a painting with an expert: the object is the same, but suddenly, “you see more.” Copenhaver added that this was not metaphorical: testimony can bring us into contact with truths we might otherwise have missed, both perceptually and intellectually. Revelation, in this light, is not epistemically inferior—it is epistemically enabling.

Another question turned toward philosophy itself: can it produce knowledge, or only understanding? If knowledge requires acquaintance, and philosophy often operates by reflection on concepts rather than perceptual contact, does it fall outside Antognazza’s strict framework? Schuman responded with characteristic flair: “If philosophers are the guardians of the principle of non-contradiction, then surely they’re doing something close to knowing.” Copenhaver was more cautious, suggesting that philosophy’s contribution may lie in the clarification and articulation of what is already dimly understood—an activity closer to “seeing with the mind’s eye” than to empirical knowing, but not for that reason outside the scope of Antognazza’s model.

As the room continued to hum with debate, one audience member raised a subtle challenge: what about inferential knowledge? If we derive truths from other known truths, isn’t that knowledge acquired indirectly? Isn’t JTB at least plausible in these cases? Schuman acknowledged the point but drew a distinction. Deductive inference preserves knowledge, he said, but does not generate it. Antognazza’s framework allows for inferential extension, but not inferential genesis. More controversial was her treatment of abductive and inductive reasoning, which she regarded as belief formation, not knowledge proper. “The mind,” Schuman insisted, “is not just a passive receiver. It’s hungry. It goes looking for the truth.” There was murmured agreement. Whether this hunger fits within Antognazza’s framework remained an open question, but no one seemed eager to close it.

The final exchange circled back to faith. One participant asked whether Antognazza’s framework, rooted in Christian sources, could accommodate traditions without a strong emphasis on hope or revelation—Judaism, for example, with its different eschatological commitments. Schuman, drawing on his own background, suggested that authority and hope may be in tension but also mutually sustaining: where hope is less central, authority bears more weight. “Faith,” he mused, “is always a negotiation between what we trust and what we long for.”

As the evening wound down, Professor Robiglio returned to the floor. He praised the discussion as one of the richest the PRC had seen and reminded the room of the significance of Antognazza’s achievement—not just in terms of its historical breadth or philosophical originality, but in its intellectual courage. “It is a book,” he said, “that dares to speak across traditions, across disciplines, even across the living and the dead.” He also noted how fitting it was that the evening had begun with Paul Richard Blum’s lucid and provocative presentation of Knebel—a work equally committed to recovering forgotten philosophical voices and confronting the modern canon with the depth of its own omissions. Taken together, the two books, and the three presentations, offered more than analysis: they enacted a model of philosophy as historically grounded, critically engaged, and dialogically alive.

With that, Franciacorta glasses were empty, and the Philosophical Review Club adjourned—until autumn, when genre, gender, and Giulia Sissa will return to stir the waters once again.