Small Portraits (01_2024)

by Rodrigo Ballon Villanueva

Jordan Lavender

We are returning from the holidays and looking forward to meeting many excellent emerging scholars. To start 2024 on the right foot, this month, we want to showcase the work of Jordan Lavender. Jordan holds a BA from the University of Georgia (US) and received his PhD in Philosophy in 2022 from the University of Notre Dame (US). Currently, he is the Postdoctoral Research Associate in Medieval Philosophy at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana.

Jordan’s dissertation examined medieval Latin scholastic discussions on the nature of subjectivity and conscious experience. He argues that there was a ‘subjective turn’ in fourteenth-century philosophy, through which medieval scholastic philosophers came to identify what we would call ‘conscious experience’ as the target of theorising about what they call ‘actual cognition’ (cognitio actualis). Several of his current projects address how this turn shaped fourteenth-century conceptions of phenomena such as consciousness, sensation, and intentionality. Additionally, he also has research interests and an ongoing project in medieval Arabic philosophy of mind.

Jordan proposes that the subjective turn invites us to reassess our picture of the relationship between scholastic and early modern thought. His way of going about this consists of studying neglected texts by scholastically trained Cartesians and seventeenth-century thinkers who engage with Descartes’s philosophy to grasp how they see the relationship between scholasticism and Cartesianism. Jordan also loves working on medieval manuscripts. At the moment, he is finishing an article funded by a US National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend on a previously unnoticed Wyclif manuscript in an Oxford college. His article will argue that this manuscript provides new information about Wyclif’s views at a crucial stage in his intellectual development and the reactions those views provoked among his contemporaries.

Two of Jordan’s recent publications include: “The Mark of the Mental in the Fourteenth Century” (British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 2023), which shows how an appreciation of the subjective turn allows us to understand what was at stake in a fourteenth-century debate about the nature of affective states; and “The Beatific Vision and the Metaphysics of Conscious Experience in John of Ripa (Res Philosophica, 2022), a study of a sophisticated theory of the metaphysics of conscious experience from the same period.