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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Western philosophy, c 500 to c 1600 > General
Michel de Montaigne (1533-1592), the great Renaissance skeptic and
pioneer of the essay form, is known for his innovative method of
philosophical inquiry which mixes the anecdotal and the personal
with serious critiques of human knowledge, politics and the law. He
is the first European writer to be intensely interested in the
representations of his own intimate life, including not just his
reflections and emotions but also the state of his body. His
rejection of fanaticism and cruelty and his admiration for the
civilizations of the New World mark him out as a predecessor of
modern notions of tolerance and acceptance of otherness. In this
volume an international team of contributors explores the range of
his philosophy and also examines the social and intellectual
contexts in which his thought was expressed.
The Late Scholastics, writing in Europe in the Baroque and Early
Modern periods, discussed a wide variety of moral questions
relating to political life in times of both peace and war. Is it
ever permissible to bribe voters? Can tax evasion be morally
justified? What are the moral duties of artists? Is it acceptable
to fight in a war one believes to be unjust? May we surrender
innocents to the enemy if it is necessary to save the state? These
questions are no less relevant for philosophers and politicians
today than they were for late scholastic thinkers. By bringing into
play the opinions and arguments of numerous authors, many of them
little known or entirely forgotten, this book is the first to
provide an in-depth treatment of the dynamic and controversial
nature of late scholastic applied moral thinking which demonstrates
its richness and diversity.
The first comprehensive one-volume collection of St.Thomas More's
writing "[A] tremendous scholarly undertaking. . . . Accessible and
transparent to both scholars and the general audience."-Renaissance
and Reformation In this book, Wegemer and Smith assemble More's
most important English and Latin works for the first time in a
single volume. This volume reveals the breadth of More's writing
and includes a rich selection of illustrations and artwork. The
book provides the most complete picture of More's work available,
serving as a major resource for early modern scholars, teachers,
students, and the general reader.
In The Business of Alchemy, Pamela Smith explores the relationships
among alchemy, the court, and commerce in order to illuminate the
cultural history of the Holy Roman Empire in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. In showing how an overriding concern with
religious salvation was transformed into a concentration on
material increase and economic policies, Smith depicts the rise of
modern science and early capitalism. In pursuing this narrative,
she focuses on that ideal prey of the cultural historian, an
intellectual of the second rank whose career and ideas typify those
of a generation. Smith follows the career of Johann Joachim Becher
(1635-1682) from university to court, his projects from New World
colonies to an old-world Pansophic Panopticon, and his ideas from
alchemy to economics. Teasing out the many meanings of alchemy for
Becher and his contemporaries, she argues that it provided Becher
with not only a direct key to power over nature but also a language
by which he could convince his princely patrons that their power
too must rest on liquid wealth. Agrarian society regarded merchants
with suspicion as the nonproductive exploiters of others' labor;
however, territorial princes turned to commerce for revenue as the
cost of maintaining the state increased. Placing Becher's career in
its social and intellectual context, Smith shows how he attempted
to help his patrons assimilate commercial values into noble court
culture and to understand the production of surplus capital as
natural and legitimate. With emphasis on the practices of natural
philosophy and extensive use of archival materials, Smith brings
alive the moment of cultural transformation in which science and
the modern state emerged.
Volume 1 includes the whole of the First Part of the Summa
Theologica. Pegis's revision and correction of the English
Dominican Translation renders Aquinas' technical terminology
consistently as it conveys the directness and simplicity of
Aquinas' writing; the Introduction, notes, and index aim at giving
the text its proper historical setting, and the reader the means of
studying St. Thomas within that setting. Volume 2 includes
substantial selections from the Second Part of the Summa Theologica
and the Summa Contra Gentiles. Pegis's revision and correction of
the English Dominican Translation renders Aquinas' technical
terminology consistently as it conveys the directness and
simplicity of Aquinas' writing; the Introduction, notes, and index
aim at giving the text its proper historical setting, and the
reader the means of studying St. Thomas within that setting.
The History and Philosophy of Science: A Reader brings together
seminal texts from antiquity to the end of the nineteenth century
and makes them accessible in one volume for the first time. With
readings from Aristotle, Aquinas, Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes,
Newton, Lavoisier, Linnaeus, Darwin, Faraday, and Maxwell, it
analyses and discusses major classical, medieval and modern texts
and figures from the natural sciences. Grouped by topic to clarify
the development of methods and disciplines and the unification of
theories, each section includes an introduction, suggestions for
further reading and end-of-section discussion questions, allowing
students to develop the skills needed to: read, interpret, and
critically engage with central problems and ideas from the history
and philosophy of science understand and evaluate scientific
material found in a wide variety of professional and popular
settings appreciate the social and cultural context in which
scientific ideas emerge identify the roles that mathematics plays
in scientific inquiry Featuring primary sources in all the core
scientific fields - astronomy, physics, chemistry, and the life
sciences - The History and Philosophy of Science: A Reader is ideal
for students looking to better understand the origins of natural
science and the questions asked throughout its history. By taking a
thematic approach to introduce influential assumptions, methods and
answers, this reader illustrates the implications of an impressive
range of values and ideas across the history and philosophy of
Western science.
One important task of metaphysics is to answer the question of what
it is for an object to exist. The first part of this book offers a
systematic reconstruction and critique of contemporary views on
existence. The upshot of this part is that the contemporary debate
has reached an impasse because none of the considered views is able
to formulate a satisfactory answer to this fundamental metaphysical
question. The second part reconstructs Thomas Aquinas's view on
existence (esse) and argues that it contributes a new perspective
which allows us to see why the contemporary debate has reached this
impasse. It has come to this point because it has taken a premise
for granted which Aquinas's view rejects, namely, that the
existence of an object consists in something's having a property. A
decisive contribution of Aquinas's theory of esse is that it makes
use of the ideas of metaphysical participation and composition. In
this way, it can be explained how an object can have esse without
being the case that esse is a property of it. This book brings
together a reconstruction from the history of philosophy with a
systematic study on existence and is therefore relevant for
scholars interested in contemporary or medieval theories of
existence.
This book critically explores the development of radical
criminological thought through the social, political and cultural
history of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It follows on from
the previous volume which examined Classical Greece until the
emergence of the early Christian movement in the Roman empire.
Through separate chapters, it discusses the key literature (myths,
fairy tales and Shakespeare), religions and philosophers of the
era, and the development of early radical views and issues over
time. This book examines the links between the origins of radical
criminology and its future. It speaks to those interested in the
(pre)history of criminology and the historical production of
criminological knowledge, drawing on Criminology, Sociology,
Classics, History, Philosophy, Ancient Literature and Politics.
"In one fashion or another, the question with which this
introduction begins is a question for every serious reader of
Plato's Republic Of what use is this philosophy to me? Averroes
clearly finds that the Republic speaks to his own time and to his
own situation. . . . Perhaps the greatest use he makes of the
Republic is to understand better the shari'a itself. . . . It is
fair to say that in deciding to paraphrase the Republic, Averroes
is asserting that his world the world defined and governed by the
Koran can profit from Plato's instruction." from Ralph Lerner s
Introduction
An indispensable primary source in medieval political philosophy
is presented here in a fully annotated translation of the
celebrated discussion of the Republic by the twelfth-century
Andalusian Muslim philosopher, Abu'l-Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn
Rushd, also know by his his Latinized name, Averroes. This work
played a major role in both the transmission and the adaptation of
the Platonic tradition in the West. In a closely argued critical
introduction, Ralph Lerner addresses several of the most important
problems raised by the work."
The first two decades of the twenty-first century witnessed a rapid
change in Western societal acceptance of homosexual activity. This
change, however, remains fundamentally unstable unless founded upon
an adequate moral theory. Today many within the Western world
assume that any argument against homosexual activity must be
founded upon religious premises. This book questions that
narrative; for the history of philosophical thought manifests a
strong non-religious consensus against such practices. This book
bridges the gap within current philosophical scholarship by
painstakingly examining the non-religious argument as found within
the great philosopher Thomas Aquinas. In the process the author
advances a novel claim: the traditional account against homosexual
activity also applies to untruthful assertive speech acts. Lying
and homosexual activity are both wrong for mutually illuminating
reasons.
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