This book, originally published in 1965, discusses the political implication of the spread of science in antiquity. It reveals how the real Greek spirit of scientific research was crushed by Plato and Aristotle, long thought-of as searchers for truth. Historian such as Polybius and Livey and the poets Pinder and Virgil are seen in a new light when set against this background of social struggle.

Augustine's Confessions is one of the most significant works of Western culture. Cast as a long, impassioned conversation with God, it is intertwined with passages of life-narrative and with key theological and philosophical insights. It is enduringly popular, and justly so. The Routledge Guidebook to Augustine's Confessions is an engaging introduction to this spiritually creative and intellectually original work. This guidebook is organized by themes: the importance of language creation and the sensible world memory, time and the self the afterlife of the Confessions. Written for readers approaching the Confessions for the first time, this guidebook addresses the literary, philosophical, historical and theological complexities of the work in a clear and accessible way. Excerpts in both Latin and English from this seminal work are included throughout the book to provide a close examination of both the autobiographical and theoretical content within the Confessions.

This volume contains eleven articles and book chapters written by John Wippel since the publication of his Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas in 1984. Many of them have also been published since the completion of his The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being. It is intended to serve as a complement to but not as a substitute for those volumes. The essays considered in this volume range widely over many different topics such as the possibility of a Christian philosophy from a Thomistic perspective, the Latin Avicenna as a source for Aquinas's metaphysics, truth in Thomas Aquinas (including truth in the intellect and truth of being), and Platonism and Aristotelianism in Aquinas's metaphysics. Several of them consider certain important axioms or adages used by Aquinas in developing his metaphysical thought, and still another investigates Aquinas's intention in writing his Commentary on Aristotle's Metaphysics. Others examine Aquinas's views on whether created agents can cause esse, whether divine omnipotence can be demonstrated philosophically, and whether Aquinas has successfully shown on philosophical grounds that God is free to create or whether because of his goodness he had to create. All of them are concerned in one way or another with important aspects of Aquinas's metaphysics. Wippel bases his interpretations on a close reading of Aquinas's texts, taking into account certain difficulties that arise from some of those texts, along with other current and sometimes quite divergent readings. While Wippel argues for a strong Platonic-Neoplatonic influence on Aquinas's metaphysics along with the widely recognized influence of Aristotle, he concludes that Aquinas's metaphysics cannot be reduced to any of these earlier sources but is a truly original production by Thomas himself.

This book shows how the mature writings of Thomas Aquinas though written in the thirteenth century have much to offer the human mind and the relationship between intellect and will, body and soul.

The Philosophy of Religion is one result of the Early Modern Reformation movements, as competing theologies purported truth claims which were equal in strength and different in contents. Renaissance thought, from Humanism through philosophy of nature, contributed to the origin of the modern concepts of God. This book explores the continuity of philosophy of religion from late medieval thinkers through humanists to late Renaissance philosophers, explaining the growth of the tensions between the philosophical and theological views. Covering the work of Renaissance authors, including Lull, Salutati, Raimundus Sabundus, Plethon, Cusanus, Valla, Ficino, Pico, Bruno, SuA!rez, and Campanella, this book offers an important understanding of the current philosophy/religion and faith/reason debates and fills the gap between medieval and early modern philosophy and theology.

Evagrius of Pontus and Gregory of Nyssa have either been overlooked by philosophers and theologians in modern times, or overshadowed by their prominent friend and brother (respectively), Gregory Nazianzus and Basil the Great. Yet they are major figures in the development of Christian thought in late antiquity and their works express a unique combination of desert and urban spiritualities in the lived and somewhat turbulent experience of an entire age. They also provide a significant link between the great ancient thinkers of the past - Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Clement and others - and the birth and transmission of the early Medieval period - associated with Boethius, Cassian and Augustine. This book makes accessible, to a wide audience, the thought of Evagrius and Gregory on the mind, soul and body, in the context of ancient philosophy/theology and the Cappadocians generally. Corrigan argues that in these two figures we witness the birth of new forms of thought and science. Evagrius and Gregory are no mere receivers of a monolithic pagan and Christian tradition, but innovative, critical interpreters of the range and limits of cognitive psychology, the soul-body relation, reflexive self-knowledge, personal and human identity and the soul's practical relation to goodness in the context of human experience and divine self-disclosure. This book provides a critical evaluation of their thought on these major issues and argues that in Evagrius and Gregory we see the important integration of many different concerns that later Christian thought was not always able to balance including: mysticism, asceticism, cognitive science, philosophy, and theology.

In this close analysis of Immanuel Kant's aesthetics in his Critique of Judgment, Dr. Julie N. Books, explains why Kant fails to provide a convincing basis for his desired necessity and universality of our aesthetic judgments about beauty. Drawing upon her extensive background in the visual arts, art history, and philosophy, Dr. Books provides a unique discussion of Kant's supersensible, illuminating how it cannot justify his a priori nature of our aesthetic judgments about beauty. She uses examples from the history of art, including paintings by Michelangelo, Caravaggio, Rubens, and Constable, to support her views. This book will make a significant addition to courses on the philosophy of Kant, aesthetics, philosophy of art, metaphysics, the history of Western philosophy, ethics, psychology, and art history.

Galileo Galilei (1564-1642) is widely recognized as one of the greatest scientific thinkers in history. Intriguingly, when offered a place in the Medici court in 1610, he requested the title of "Philosopher and Chief Mathematician." Reading Nature's Book: Galileo and the Birth of Modern Philosophy is the first book-length study written with undergraduates in mind that examines the philosophical implications (both theoretical and historical) of Galileo's scientific discoveries, including many matters that were later taken up by seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophers. This close analysis of Galileo's philosophical insights demonstrates the prominent place his thought should have in the history of early modern philosophy. Reading Nature's Book provides contextual material for college and university students enrolled in modern philosophy courses, introducing them to ideas and concepts that dominated philosophical discussion during the era. Furthermore, students and scholars interested in the history of philosophy of science will also benefit from a decidedly philosophical approach to such a leading scientific figure. Many of the topics explored by Galileo continue to be of philosophical interest today, including scientific methodology and the relation between science and religion.

This sourcebook explores how the Middle Ages dealt with questions related to the mental life of creatures great and small. It makes accessible a wide range of key Latin texts from the fourth to the fourteenth century in fresh English translations. Specialists and non-specialists alike will find many surprising insights in this comprehensive collection of sources on the medieval philosophy of animal minds. The book's structure follows the distinction between the different aspects of the mental. The author has organized the material in three main parts: cognition, emotions, and volition. Each part contains translations of texts by different medieval thinkers. The philosophers chosen include well-known figures like Augustine, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas. The collection also profiles the work of less studied thinkers like John Blund, (Pseudo-)Peter of Spain, and Peter of Abano. In addition, among those featured are several translated here into English for the first time. Each text comes with a short introduction to the philosopher, the context, and the main arguments of the text plus a section with bibliographical information and recommendations for further reading. A general introduction to the entire volume presents the basic concepts and questions of the philosophy of animal minds and explains how the medieval discussion relates to the contemporary debate. This sourcebook is valuable for anyone interested in the history of philosophy, especially medieval philosophy of mind. It will also appeal to scholars and students from other fields, such as psychology, theology, and cultural studies.

While there is ever-growing literature on the economic, cultural, and political aspects of globalization, there are no critical, up-to-date studies on its philosophical and ideological underpinnings. Vincenzo Pavone fills this gap in the literature by analyzing one of the most interesting actors operating on a global scale: the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). By discussing the relation between scientific humanism and the development of UNESCO, the author studies the relationship between UNESCO and the changes which have occurred in its self-perception, its identity, and its vision of globalization. The first part of the book discusses the emergence of scientific humanism among thinkers such as Bacon, Comenius, and the Puritan reformers, and goes on to detail its subsequent connection with the religious reformation proposed by positivists such as Saint-Simon, Comte, and Renan. Pavone also assesses the influence of both 17th and 19th century scientific humanism on the ideas of Julian Huxley, the founding father of modern scientific humanism and the first Director of UNESCO. In its second part, Pavone outlines and evaluates the role played by scientific humanism in the history of UNESCO by inspiring a conception of it as a truly global organization-a conception applicable to the first decade of its existence and revived after the end of the Cold War. The third part discusses the relationship between scientific humanism and UNESCO with respect to four of its programmes: the Management of Social Transformations Programme (MOST), the International Bioethics Committee (IBC), the Dakar Framework for Action, and the Culture of Peace Programme (CPP). Based on a universal reform of education, the creation of a system of global governance, and the philosophical appeal of a culture of peace based on science, humanism, and human rights, UNESCO's vision of globalization represents an intriguing example of how our global future has been conceived and, to some extent, realized.

The Routledge Guidebook to Aquinas' Summa Theologiae introduces readers to a work which represents the pinnacle of medieval Western scholarship and which has inspired numerous commentaries, imitators, and opposing views. Outlining the main arguments Aquinas utilizes to support his conclusions on various philosophical and theological questions, this clear and comprehensive guide explores: the historical context in which Aquinas wrote a critical discussion of the topics outlined in the text including theology, metaphysics, epistemology, psychology, ethics, and political theory the ongoing influence of the Summa Theologiae in modern philosophy and theology. Offering a close reading of the original work, this guidebook highlights the central themes of Aquinas' masterwork and is an essential read for anyone seeking an understanding of this highly influential work in the history of philosophy.

Descartes gave the human intellect the central role in rationalism, his system therefore is a variant of intellectual rationalism. Other forms of rationalism had emerged in scholastic philosophy and the ancient philosophies of Plato and Aristotle. While Descartes had reservations with respect to all of them, he still adopted some of their elements: not even such a self-directed and critical philosopher as Descartes could have proceeded on the difficult journey towards truth without any baggage of tradition whatsoever. Those who treated this baggage as a useless burden and have attempted to pursue truth without carrying it, have only discovered things which had long been known.

The book analyses the medieval vision of the world as depicted in Dante Alighieri's poetic works. In detail it discusses two works, The Banquet and The Divine Comedy, and offers a view on politics, faith and the universe of the medieval period. For modern people that period with its debates, polemics and visions represents something exceedingly remote, obscure and unknown. While admiring Dante's poetic artistry, we often fail to recognize the inspirations that permeated the works of medieval scholars and poets. Although times are constantly changing, every generation has to face the same fundamental questions of meaning, purpose and value of human existence: Dante's cosmological and poetical picture turns out to be surprisingly universal.

Compact but singularly well thought out material of a theological, logical, poetic as well as philosophical nature.

This book is a ten-step journey around the thought and poetry of the most sensitive Italian visionary of modernity, Giacomo Leopardi, whose contribution to Western thought has been acclaimed by admirers from Schopenhauer to Nietzsche to Benjamin. A variety of readings, moving between different disciplines and approaches - including film studies, psychoanalysis, and queer theory - shed new light on Leopardi's fascinating and at the same time epistemologically radical compound of poetic imagination and philosophical complexity. An advocate of an ultra-philosophy, which aims to negotiate the fracture opened in Western imagination by the irrecoverable loss of ancient "illusions", Leopardi's thought seems more relevant than ever in the post-human era, offering an (un)timely meditation on desire, suffering, and imagination as the foundational features of humanity.

The mid-twentieth century saw a change in paradigms of art history: iconology. The main claim of this novel trend in art history was that renowned Renaissance artists (such as Botticelli, Leonardo, or Michelangelo) created imaginative syntheses between their art and contemporary cosmology, philosophy, theology, and magic. The Neoplatonism in the books by Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola became widely acknowledged for its lasting influence on art. It thus became common knowledge that Renaissance artists were not exclusively concerned with problems intrinsic to their work but that their artifacts encompassed a much larger intellectual and cultural horizon. This volume brings together historians concerned with the history of their own discipline - and also those whose research is on the art and culture of the Italian Renaissance itself - with historians from a wide variety of specialist fields, in order to engage with the contested field of iconology. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, Renaissance history, Renaissance studies, historiography, philosophy, theology, gender studies, and literature.

This study discusses the substance-tradition from Aristotle to Kant, Goedel, Quine, Strawson, Armstrong and others, the concept of matter and causation in quantum physics, Being-thinking from Aristotle to Heidegger, and system-building from Plato to Whitehead. It synthesizes the Kantian phenomena-noumena, extends the Quinean ontological commitment, creates a Goedelian foundationalist truth-probabilism, relativizes the Whiteheadian actual entity, extends the Aristotelian-Heideggerian Being to a nomic-nominal, verbal-processual To Be and overhauls perspectival-absolutist, non-foundationalist and relativist concepts of Reality. The resulting scientific ontology is termed Einaic Ontology for maximalist, mutually collusive, categorial reasons. The Appendix explains Heidegger's anthropologized Being as ontologically and cosmologically defective.

David George and John Fortin, O.S.B., offer students and scholars the first modern-language translation of commentaries by twelfth-century arts master Clarembald of Arras on two works by the Roman philosopher Boethius (480-524): De Hebdomadibus and De Trinitate. This useful volume also includes extensive notes and a helpful introduction discussing the biography of Clarembald, his writings, and his Latin style.

The Boethian Commentaries of Clarembald of Arras reveal that Clarembald, a student of Thierry of Chartres and Hugh of St. Victor, often departed from the style of the straightforward commentaries of his masters. It also shows that Clarembald used his commentaries to defend the Church from misconceptions and heresies that were considered a threat to orthodoxy during his time. This welcome translation is an invaluable resource for anyone with an interest in medieval philosophy and theology.

If philosophy has limits, what lies beyond them? One answer is literature. In this study, rather than seeing literature as a source of illustrations of philosophical themes, the author considers both philosophy and literature as sometimes competing but often complementary ways of making sense of and conveying the character of ethical experience. She does so through an analysis of ideas about language, experience and ethics in the philosophy of Nietzsche, and of the way in which these themes are worked out and elaborated in the writings of Robert Musil and the Turkish novelist Oguz Atay.

Reframing Aristotle’s natural philosophy, this wide-ranging collection of essays reveals the centrality of magic to his thinking. From late medieval and Renaissance discussions on the attribution of magical works to Aristotle to the philosophical and social justifications of magic, international contributors chart magic as the mother science of natural philosophy. Tracing the nascent presence of Aristotelianism in early modern Europe, this volume shows the adaptability and openness of Aristotelianism to magic. Weaving the paranormal and the scientific together, it pairs the supposed superstition of the pre-modern era with modern scientific sensibilities. Essays focus on the work of early modern scholars and magicians such as Giambattista Della Porta, Wolferd Senguerd, and Johann Nikolaus Martius. The attribution of the Secretum secretorum to Aristotle, the role of illusionism, and the relationship between the technical and magical all provide further insight into the complex picture of magic, Aristotle and early modern Europe. Aristotelianism and Magic in Early Modern Europe proposes an innovative way of approaching the development of pre-modern science whilst also acknowledging the crucial role that concepts like magic and illusion played in Aristotle’s time.

This work argues that teleological motives lie at the heart of Kant's critical philosophy and that a precise analysis of teleological structures can both illuminate the basic strategy of its fundamental arguments and provide a key to understanding its unity. It thus aims, through an examination of each of Kant's major writings, to provide a detailed interpretation of his claim that philosophy in the true sense must consist of a teleologia rationis humanae. The author argues that Kant's critical philosophy forged a new link between traditional teleological concepts and the basic structure of rationality, one that would later inform the dynamic conception of reason at the heart of German Idealism. The process by which this was accomplished began with Kant's development of a uniquely teleological conception of systematic unity already in the precritical period. The individual chapters of this work attempt to show how Kant adapted and refined this conception of systematic unity so that it came to form the structural basis for the critical philosophy.

Etienne Pasquier (1529-1615) was a renowned magistrate of the Parliament of Paris, a poet, an advisor to the last Valois kings as well as to Henri IV, and a founder of modern French historiography. This book examines Pasquier's use of various genres: the dialogue, the published correspondence, and ecclesiastic history as well as his self-fashioning and his recognition by posterity for his efforts to protect the French state against threats both real and invented during the French Civil Wars of Religion. Pasquier strategically casts the Jesuits as the enemy to aid his self-construction as guardian of France and her political survival.

In 1543, Copernicus publicly defended geokinetic and heliocentric universe. This book examines why and how he became a Copernican and what his affirmation of heliocentrism means in the context of the Scientific Revolution. Close reading of Copernicus' texts and examination of his sociocultural context reveals his commitment to the Platonist program of True Astronomy, which is to discover the well-proportioned, harmonious universe, hidden beyond visible appearances, but accessible through mathematical reasoning. The principal goal of the work is to show that the hypothesis of Copernicus' Platonism brings unity and internal coherence to his project and provides historical background of his contributions to the Scientific Revolution.

This comprehensive book outlines the life and works of an important revolutionary intellectual of the 16th Century. This book follows Bruno s life and the development of his thought in the order in which he declared it. Giordano Bruno was an Italian Dominican friar, philosopher, mathematician and astronomer. He was burned at the stake after the Roman Inquisition found him guilty of heresy but his modern scientific thought and cosmology became very influential. His writings on science also showed interest in magic and alchemy and those are outlined in this book alongside what he is most remembered for - his place in the history of the relationship between science and faith.