The importance of Bessarion's contribution to the history of Byzantine and Renaissance philosophy and culture during the 15th century is beyond dispute. However, an adequate appreciation of his contribution still remains a desideratum of scholarly research. One serious impediment to scholarly progress is the fact that the critical edition of his main philosophical work "In Calumniatorem Platonis" is incomplete and that this work has not been translated in its entirety into any modern language yet. Same can be stated about several minor but equally important treatises on literary, theological and philosophical subjects. This makes editing, translating and interpreting his literary, religious and philosophical works a scholarly priority. Papers assembled in this volume highlight a number of philological, philosophical and historical aspects that are crucial to our understanding of Bessarion's role in the history of European civilization and to setting the directions of future research in this field.

Nicole Oresme was one of the most original and influential thinkers of the fourteenth century. He is best known for his mathematical discoveries, his economic theories, as well as his vernacular translations of cosmological and ethical texts that were undertaken at the request of King Charles V. This volume sheds light on the beginning of Oresme's scientific activity at the University of Paris (ca. 1340 - ca. 1350), a period of his intellectual career about which little is known. Over the course of this decade, Oresme lectured on many Aristotelian texts on natural philosophy, such as the Physics, On the Heavens, On generation and corruption, Meteorology, and On the Soul. Oresme's commentaries on Aristotle's Meteorology count among his only unpublished texts. This volume presents the first critical edition of books I-II.10 of the second redaction of Oresme's Questions on Meteorology. The edition is preceded by a historical and philological introduction that discusses the context of Oresme's scientific career and examines the manuscript tradition.

In our daily lives, we are surrounded by all sorts of things - such as trees, cars, persons, or madeleines - and perception allows us access to them. But what does 'to perceive' actually mean? What is it that we perceive? How do we perceive? Do we perceive the same way animals do? Does reason play a role in perception? Such questions occur naturally today. But was it the same in the past, centuries ago? The collected volume tackles this issue by turning to the Latin philosophy of the 13th and 14th centuries. Did medieval thinkers raise the same, or similar, questions as we do with respect to perception? What answers did they provide? What arguments did they make for raising the questions they did, and for the answers they gave to them? The philosophers taken into consideration are, among others, Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, William of Auvergne, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, John Pecham, Richard Rufus, Peter Olivi, Robert Kilwardby, John Buridan, and Jean of Jandun. Contributors are Elena Baltuta, Daniel De Haan, Martin Klein, Andrew LaZella, Lukas Licka, Mattia Mantovani, Andre Martin, Dominik Perler, Paolo Rubini, Jose Filipe Silva, Juhana Toivanen, and Rega Wood.

In 1632, the Amsterdam regents founded an Athenaeum or 'Illustrious School'. This kind of institution provided academic teaching, although it could not grant degrees and had no compulsory four-faculty system. Athenaeums proliferated in the first century after the Dutch Revolt, but few of them survived long. They have been interpreted as the manifestation of an evolving vision of the role of a higher education; this book, by contrast, argues that education at the Amsterdam Athenaeum was staunchly traditional both in methods and in substance. While religious, philosophical and scientific disputes rocked contemporary Dutch learned society, this analysis of letters, orations and disputations reveals that a traditional and Aristotelian humanism thrived at the Athenaeum until well into the seventeenth century.

John Buridan (d. ca. 1360) was one of the most talented and influential philosophers of the later Middle Ages. He spent his career as a master in the Arts Faculty at the University of Paris, producing commentaries and independent treatises on logic, metaphysics, natural philosophy, and ethics. His Questions Commentary on the eight books of Aristotle's Physics is the most important witness to Buridan's teachings in the field of natural philosophy. The commentary was widely read during the later Middle Ages and the Renaissance. This volume presents the first critical edition of books I & II of the final redaction of Buridan's Questions Commentary on the Physics. The critical edition of the Latin text is accompanied by a detailed guide to the contents of Buridan's questions.

Thomas Aquinas and John Duns Scotus are arguably the most celebrated representatives of the 'Golden Age' of scholasticism. Primarily, they are known for their work in natural theology, which seeks to demonstrate tenets of faith without recourse to premises rooted in dogma or revelation. Scholars of this Golden Age drew on a wealth of tradition, dating back to Plato and Aristotle, and taking in the Arabic and Jewish interpretations of these thinkers, to produce a wide variety of answers to the question 'How much can we learn of God?' Some responded by denying us any positive knowledge of God. Others believed that we have such knowledge, yet debated whether its acquisition requires some action on the part of God in the form of an illumination bestowed on the knower. Scotus and Aquinas belong to the more empirically minded thinkers in this latter group, arguing against a necessary role for illumination. Many scholars believe that Aquinas and Scotus exhaust the spectrum of answers available to this circle, with Aquinas maintaining that our knowledge is quite confused and Scotus that it is completely accurate. In this study, Alexander Hall argues that the truth about Aquinas and Scotus lies somewhere in the middle. Hall's book recommends itself to the general reader who is looking for an overview of this period in Western philosophy as well as to the specialist, for no other study on the market addresses this long-standing matter of interpretation in any detail.

Thomas Aquinas is the most widely read and arguably most influential of the medieval philosophers. He is famous for his impressive and coherent synthesis of Greek Philosophy and Christian Theology and his magisterial "Summa Theologiae" is a hugely important, and enduring, text in the history of philosophy. Yet he is also a very difficult thinker and his ideas present a number of challenges to his readers.
"Aquinas: A Guide for the Perplexed" is a clear and thorough account of Aquinas's thought, his major works and ideas, providing an ideal guide to the important and complex writings of this key thinker. The book introduces all the key concepts and themes in Aquinas's thought and examines the ways in which they have influenced philosophical and theological thought. Geared towards the specific requirements of students who need to reach a sound understanding of Aquinas's ideas, the book serves as a clear and concise introduction to his philosophy and natural theology. This is the ideal companion to the study of this most influential and challenging of thinkers.

This monograph proposes a new (dialogical) way of studying the different forms of correlational inference, known in the Islamic jurisprudence as qiyas. According to the authors' view, qiyas represents an innovative and sophisticated form of dialectical reasoning that not only provides new epistemological insights into legal argumentation in general (including legal reasoning in Common and Civil Law) but also furnishes a fine-grained pattern for parallel reasoning which can be deployed in a wide range of problem-solving contexts and does not seem to reduce to the standard forms of analogical reasoning studied in contemporary philosophy of science and argumentation theory. After an overview of the emergence of qiyas and of the work of al-Shirazi penned by Soufi Youcef, the authors discuss al-Shirazi's classification of correlational inferences of the occasioning factor (qiyas al-'illa). The second part of the volume deliberates on the system of correlational inferences by indication and resemblance (qiyas al-dalala, qiyas al-shabah). The third part develops the main theoretical background of the authors' work, namely, the dialogical approach to Martin-Loef's Constructive Type Theory. The authors present this in a general form and independently of adaptations deployed in parts I and II. Part III also includes an appendix on the relevant notions of Constructive Type Theory, which has been extracted from an overview written by Ansten Klev. The book concludes with some brief remarks on contemporary approaches to analogy in Common and Civil Law and also to parallel reasoning in general.

Medieval logic is usually divided into the branches that derived from Aristotle's organon - the 'logica vetus' and 'logica nova', and those invented in the Middle Ages, the 'logica modernorum'. In this volume, a group of distinguished specialists asks whether the ancient roots of medieval logic were not in fact more varied. Stoic logic was mostly lost, but were some of its themes transmitted, even in distorted form, through Boethius and through the grammatical tradition? And did other schools, such as the sceptics and the Platonists, contribute in their own ways to medieval logic?

From Empedocles to Wittgenstein is a collection of fifteen historical essays in philosophy, written by Sir Anthony Kenny in the early years of the 21st century. In the main they are concerned with four of the great philosophers whom he most esteems, namely Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Wittgenstein. The author is not only one of the most respected historians of philosophy, and possibly the widest-ranging, but also one of the most successful at writing on the subject for a broad readership. In this volume he presents scholarly explorations of some themes which caught his interest as he worked on his acclaimed four-volume New History of Western Philosophy.

Constant J. Mews offers an intellectual biography of two of the best known personalities of the twelfth century. Peter Abelard was a controversial logician at the cathedral school of Notre-Dame in Paris when he first met Heloise, who was the brilliant and outspoken niece of a cathedral canon and who was then engaged in the study of philosophy. After an intense love affair and the birth of a child, they married in secret in a bid to placate her uncle. Nonetheless the vengeful canon Fulbert had Abelard castrated, following which he became a monk at St. Denis, while Heloise became a nun at Argenteuil. Mews, a recognized authority on Abelard's writings, traces his evolution as a thinker from his earliest work on dialectic (paying particular attention to his debt to Roscelin of Compiegne and William of Champeaux) to his most mature reflections on theology and ethics. Abelard's interest in the doctrine of universals was one part of his broader philosophical interest in language, theology, and ethics, says Mews. He argues that Heloise played a significant role in broadening Abelard's intellectual interests during the period 1115-17, as reflected in a passionate correspondence in which the pair articulated and debated the nature of their love. Mews believes that the sudden end of this early relationship provoked Abelard to return to writing about language with new depth, and to begin applying these concerns to theology. Only after Abelard and Heloise resumed close epistolary contact in the early 1130s, however, did Abelard start to develop his thinking about sin and redemption--in ways that respond closely to the concerns of Heloise. Mews emphasizes both continuity and development in what these two very original thinkers had to say."

Edited and introduced by Robert Arp, Revisiting Aquinas' Proofs for the Existence of God is a collection of new papers written by scholars focusing on the famous Five Proofs or Ways (Quinque Viae) for the existence of God put forward by St. Thomas Aquinas (1225-1274) near the beginning of his unfinished tome, Summa Theologica. It is not an exaggeration to say that not only is Aquinas' Summa a landmark text in the history of Western philosophy and Christianity, but also that the Five Proofs discussed therein-namely, the arguments that conclude to the Unmoved Mover, Uncaused Cause, Necessary Being, Superlative Being, and Intelligent Director-are as compelling today as they were in the 13th Century. Written in a debate format with different scholars arguing for and against each Proof, the papers in the book consist of arguments utilizing various combinations of contemporary science and philosophical ideas to bolster the positions. The result is a revisiting of Aquinas' Proofs that is relevant, stimulating, enlightening, and refreshing.

Human beings have questioned their existence for as long as they have been able to ponder and reason. In attempting to answer the questions of human existence, some have become religious, others atheist; some spiritual, others agnostic; some scientific, others philosophical. Regardless of how the questions have been answered, we have only been left with more questions or the concession that many things about our existence are just unknowable or beyond our ability to understand. Because of the difficulty in continually pondering the conclusions of what seem to be unanswerable questions, we have turned our attention to fantasy and science fiction-genres of thought that allow us to escape the reality of own ignorance. Finally-a book has been written that solves this human dilemma It is the most powerful book ever composed on the subject matter. It transcends fantasy and science fiction in its simple presentation of reality and leaves the reader with the most profound perspective of human existence available. It has the potential of changing one's life, even the whole world, forever. This book answers all of life's questions, leaving none on which to speculate or remained confused. It provides the most complete and comprehensive answers to human reality ever given. Every piece of the puzzle needed to understand who we are and why we exist is included. And the most compelling element is that it speaks to our common sense-the very essence of our humanity If read with an open mind, this book will unfold a whole new perspective of the world and its inhabitants and what their relationship is with the rest of the Universe. With this new and much needed perspective, we stand to gain a full understanding of ourselves. We will no longer remain shackled with the chains of ignorance, prejudice, and inequality that have kept humankind in bondage and misery for thousands of years. Armed with this knowledge, we will be able to reshape our individual realities and together transform our world, not just for ourselves, but for all life upon earth.

By exploring the philosophical character of some of the greatest medieval thinkers, An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy provides a rich overview of philosophy in the world of Latin Christianity. Explores the deeply philosophical character of such medieval thinkers as Augustine, Boethius, Eriugena, Anselm, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Scotus, and Ockham Reviews the central features of the epistemological and metaphysical problem of universals Shows how medieval authors adapted philosophical ideas from antiquity to apply to their religious commitments Takes a broad philosophical approach of the medieval era by,taking account of classical metaphysics, general culture, and religious themes

"In this massive, meticulously researched work Trinkaus makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Italian humanists and the Christian Renaissance in Italy. . . . The author argues persuasively that the Italian humanists drew their inspiration more from the church fathers than from the pagan ancients. . . . [This is] the most comprehensive and most important study of Italian humanism to appear in English. It is a mine of information, offering, among other things, detailed analyses of texts which have been ignored even by Italian scholars." -Library Journal

Ruth Glasner presents an illuminating reappraisal of Averroes' physics. Glasner is the first scholar to base her interpretation on the full range of Averroes' writings, including texts that are extant only in Hebrew manuscripts and have not been hitherto studied. She reveals that Averroes changed his interpretation of the basic notions of physics - the structure of corporeal reality and the definition of motion - more than once. After many hesitations he offers a bold new interpretation of physics which Glasner calls 'Aristotelian atomism'. Ideas that are usually ascribed to scholastic scholars, and others that were traced back to Averroes but only in a very general form, are shown not only to have originated with him, but to have been fully developed by him into a comprehensive and systematic physical system. Unlike earlier Greek or Muslim atomistic systems, Averroes' Aristotelian atomism endeavours to be fully scientific, by Aristotelian standards, and still to provide a basis for an indeterministic natural philosophy. Commonly known as 'the commentator' and usually considered to be a faithful follower of Aristotle, Averroes is revealed in his commentaries on the Physics to be an original and sophisticated philosopher.

During the seventeenth century Francisco Suarez was considered one of the greatest philosophers of the age. He was the last great Scholastic thinker and profoundly influenced the thought of his contemporaries within both Catholic and Protestant circles. Suarez contributed to all fields of philosophy, from natural law, ethics, and political theory to natural philosophy, the philosophy of mind, and philosophical psychology, and-most importantly-to metaphysics, and natural theology. Echoes of his thinking reverberate through the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and beyond. Yet curiously Suarez has not been studied in detail by historians of philosophy. It is only recently that he has emerged as a significant subject of critical and historical investigation for historians of late medieval and early modern philosophy. Only in recent years have small sections of Suarez's magnum opus, the Metaphysical Disputations, been translated into English, French, and Italian. The historical task of interpreting Suarez's thought is still in its infancy. The Philosophy of Francisco Suarez is one of the first collections in English written by the leading scholars who are largely responsible for this new trend in the history of philosophy. It covers all areas of Suarez's philosophical contributions, and contains cutting-edge research which will shape and frame scholarship on Suarez for years to come-as well as the history of seventeenth-century generally. This is an essential text for anyone interested in Suarez, the seventeenth-century world of ideas, and late Scholastic or early modern philosophy.

Elijah Del Medigo (1458-1493) was a Jewish Aristotelian philosopher living in Padua, whose work influenced many of the leading philosophers of the early Renaissance. His Two Investigations on the Nature of the Human Soul uses Aristotle's De anima to theorize on two of the most discussed and most controversial philosophical debates of the Renaissance: the nature of human intellect and the obtaining of immortality through intellectual perfection. In this book, Michael Engel places Del Medigo's philosophical work and his ideas about the human intellect within the context of the wider Aristotelian tradition. Providing a detailed account of the unique blend of Hebrew, Islamic, Latin and Greek traditions that influenced the Two Investigations, Elijah Del Medigo and Paduan Aristotelianism provides an important contribution to our understanding of Renaissance Aristotelianisms and scholasticisms. In particular, through his defense of the Muslim philosopher Averroes' hotly debated interpretation of the De anima and his rejection of the moderate Latin Aristotelianism championed by the Christian Thomas Aquinas, Engel traces how Del Medigo's work on the human intellect contributed to the development of a major Aristotelian controversy. Investigating the ways in which multicultural Aristotelian sources contributed to his own theory of a united human intellect, Elijah Del Medigo and Paduan Aristotelianism demonstrates the significant impact made by this Jewish philosopher on the history of the Aristotelian tradition.

A Companion to Jan Hus includes eleven substantial essays covering the central aspects of the life, thought and commemoration of Jan Hus ( 1415), Czech theologian, reformer and martyr. Besides older experienced specialists in the Hussite studies, also younger researchers who enter the scientific discourse with new approaches participated in the volume. Experts and students alike will profit from this guide to Jan Hus, who was well known as follower of John Wyclif and forerunner of Martin Luther. Burning of Jan Hus at the stake at the Council of Constance gave rise in Bohemia to religious and social revolt that ushered the European reformations of the 16th century.

Rory Fox challenges the traditional understanding that Thomas Aquinas believed that God exists totally outside of time. His study investigates the work of several mid-thirteenth-century writers, including Albert the Great and Bonaventure as well as Aquinas, examining their understanding of the topological and metrical properties of time. Fox thus provides access to a wealth of material on medieval concepts of time and eternity, while using the conceptual tools of modern analytic philosophy to express his conclusions.