Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) was arguably the single most important Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages, with an impact on the later Jewish tradition that was unparalleled by any of his contemporaries. In this volume of new essays, world-leading scholars address themes relevant to his philosophical outlook, including his relationship with his Islamicate surroundings and the impact of his work on subsequent Jewish and Christian writings, as well as his reception in twentieth-century scholarship. The essays also address the nature and aim of Maimonides' philosophical writing, including its connection with biblical exegesis, and the philosophical and theological arguments that are central to his work, such as revelation, ritual, divine providence, and teleology. Wide-ranging and fully up-to-date, the volume will be highly valuable for those interested in Jewish history and thought, medieval philosophy, and religious studies.

Towards the end of his life, St. Thomas Aquinas produced a brief, non-technical work summarizing some of the main points of his massive Summa Theologiae. This 'compendium' was intended as an introductory handbook for students and scholars who might not have access to the larger work. It remains the best concise introduction to Aquinas's thought. Furthermore, it is extremely interesting to scholars because it represents Aquinas's last word on these topics. Aquinas does not break new ground or re-think earlier positions but often states them more directly and with greater precision than can be found elsewhere. There is only one available English translation of the Compendium (published as 'Aquinas's Shorter Summa: Saint Thomas's Own Concise Version of his Summa Theologiae, ' by Sophia Institute Press). It is published by a very small Catholic publishing house, is marketed to the devotional readership, contains no scholarly apparatus. Richard Regan is a highly respected Aquinas translator, who here relies on the definitive Leonine edition of the Latin text. His work will be received as the premier English version of this important text.

With the rise of naturalism in the art of the late Middle Ages and the Renaissance there developed an extensive and diverse literature about art which helped to explain, justify and shape its new aims. In this book, David Summers provides an investigation of the philosophical and psychological notions invoked in this new theory and criticism. From a thorough examination of the sources, he shows how the medieval language of mental discourse derived from an understanding of classical thought.

The "Platonic Theology" is a visionary work and the philosophical masterpiece of Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499), the Florentine scholar-philosopher-magus who was largely responsible for the Renaissance revival of Plato. A student of the Neoplatonic schools of Plotinus and Proclus, he was committed to reconciling Platonism with Christianity, in the hope that such a reconciliation would initiate a spiritual revival and return of the golden age. His Platonic evangelizing was eminently successful and widely influential, and his "Platonic Theology," translated into English for the first time in this edition, is one of the keys to understanding the art, thought, culture, and spirituality of the Renaissance.

This is the fifth of a projected six volumes.

Did God exist a thousand years ago? This book discusses and analyses the origins of questioning God and Religion in Medieval Middle Eastern and European literature and thought. Author Fatemeh Azinfar analyses two medieval texts from the Middle East, "A Thousand and One Nights" and "Vis and Ramin", both of which question God's existence and actions. Europeans such as Dante, Abelard, Chaucer, the author of Chanson de Roland, and the author of "The Pearl" poem are shown to have asked similar questions. Azinfar argues that the European authors were influenced by the religious scepticism inherent in medieval Middle Eastern texts. The roots of the ideas of rationalism, existentialism, surrealism, and feminism are traced from the Islamic world to the medieval West. Azin-far shows that a period most view as steeped in religious dogmatism was actually an analytical era, rooted in rationality, scientific advancement, and scepticism. Tales of questing knights who rescue damsels also con-tain theories that question traditional views on religion, the possibility of the existence of a physical world, and nihilism.

This is the first of a three-volume anthology intended as a companion to The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Volume 1 is concerned with the logic and the philosophy of language, and comprises fifteen important texts on questions of meaning and inference that formed the basis of Medieval philosophy. As far as is practicable, complete works or topically complete segments of larger works have been selected. The editors have provided a full introduction to the volume and detailed introductory headnotes to each text; the volume is also indexed comprehensively.

A history of philosophy from 1100-1600 concentrating on the Aristotelian tradition in the Latin Christian West. "will long remain the major guide to later medieval philosophy and related topics. Most of the essays are exciting and challenging, some of them truly brilliant." --Speculum

The Cambridge History of Renaissance Philosophy offers a balanced and comprehensive account of philosophical thought from the middle of the fourteenth century to the emergence of modern philosophy at the turn of the seventeenth century. The Renaissance has attracted intense scholarly attention for over a century, but in the beginning the philosophy of the period was relatively neglected and this is the first volume in English to synthesize for a wider readership the substantial and sophisticated research now available. The volume is organized by branch of philosophy rather than by individual philosopher or by school. The intention has been to present the internal development of different aspects of the subject in their own terms and within their historical context. This structure also emphasizes naturally the broader connotations of "philosophy" in that intellectual world.

While the great medieval philosopher, theologian, and physician Maimonides is acknowledged as a leading Jewish thinker, his intellectual contacts with his surrounding world are often described as related primarily to Islamic philosophy. "Maimonides in His World" challenges this view by revealing him to have wholeheartedly lived, breathed, and espoused the rich Mediterranean culture of his time.

Sarah Stroumsa argues that Maimonides is most accurately viewed as a Mediterranean thinker who consistently interpreted his own Jewish tradition in contemporary multicultural terms. Maimonides spent his entire life in the Mediterranean region, and the religious and philosophical traditions that fed his thought were those of the wider world in which he lived. Stroumsa demonstrates that he was deeply influenced not only by Islamic philosophy but by Islamic culture as a whole, evidence of which she finds in his philosophy as well as his correspondence and legal and scientific writings. She begins with a concise biography of Maimonides, then carefully examines key aspects of his thought, including his approach to religion and the complex world of theology and religious ideas he encountered among Jews, Christians, Muslims, and even heretics; his views about science; the immense and unacknowledged impact of the Almohads on his thought; and his vision of human perfection.

This insightful cultural biography restores Maimonides to his rightful place among medieval philosophers and affirms his central relevance to the study of medieval Islam.

Rethinking humanity as a concept in our age of globalization and its relevance to the social and political reality of our times are the topic of this book. It calls for the reclaiming of humanism as an effective response to the conflict, turmoil, and violence we witness in the world today. Concepts of humanity and humanism have become suspect of naivete at best, and guilty of bad faith and repressive ideologies at worst. Yet, hope for improvement is incorrigibly human; the concept of humanity still holds enormous attraction to intellectuals and humanistic scholars. At the same time, it is important to realize that the critique of humanism is very much based on - and limited to - Western social and historical experience. To re-conceptualize humanity and humanism from a truly global perspective will help in relclaiming a more inclusive kind of humanism. In this sense, a cross-cultural perspective is important for reclaiming humanism in our age of globalization. The present volume is the result of such an effort. The diversity of the authors views speaks eloquently to the complexity of the concept of humanity or what constitutes the distinctly human, and therefore the necessity to have an in-depth dialogue on the fate of humanity.

In Medieval Allegory as Epistemology, Marco Nievergelt argues that late medieval dream-poetry was able to use the tools of allegorical fiction to explore a set of complex philosophical questions regarding the nature of human knowledge. The focus is on three of the most widely read and influential poems of the later Middle Ages: Jean de Meun's Roman de la Rose; the Pélerinages trilogy of Guillaume de Deguileville; and William Langland's vision of Piers Plowman in its various versions. All three poets grapple with a collection of shared, closely related epistemological problems that emerged in Western Europe during the thirteenth century, in the wake of the reception of the complete body of Aristotle's works on logic and the natural sciences. This study therefore not only examines the intertextual and literary-historical relations linking the work of the three poets, but takes their shared interest in cognition and epistemology as a starting point to assess their wider cultural and intellectual significance in the context of broader developments in late medieval philosophy of mind, knowledge, and language. Vernacular literature more broadly played an extremely important role in lending an enlarged cultural resonance to philosophical ideas developed by scholastic thinkers, but it is also shown that allegorical narrative could prompt philosophical speculation on its own terms, deliberately interrogating the dominance and authority of scholastic discourses and institutions by using first-person fictional narrative as a tool for intellectual speculation.

John Buridan was a fourteenth-century philosopher who enjoyed an enormous reputation for about two hundred years, was then totally neglected, and is now being 'rediscovered' through his relevance to contemporary work in philosophical logic. The final chapter of Buridan's Sophismata deals with problems about self-reference, and in particular with the semantic paradoxes. He offers his own distinctive solution to the well-known 'Liar Paradox' and introduces a number of other paradoxes that will be unfamiliar to most logicians. Buridan also moves on from these problems to more general questions about the nature of propositions, the criteria of their truth and falsity and the concepts of validity and knowledge. This edition of that chapter is intended to make Buridan's ideas and arguments accessible to a wider range of readers. The volume should interest many philosophers, linguists and logicians, who are increasingly finding in medieval work striking anticipations of their own concerns.

Leo Bersani, known for his provocative interrogations of psychoanalysis, sexuality, and the human body, centers his latest book on a surprisingly simple image: a newborn baby simultaneously crying out and drawing its first breath. These twin ideas--absorption and expulsion, the intake of physical and emotional nourishment and the exhalation of breath--form the backbone of Receptive Bodies, a thoughtful new essay collection. These titular bodies range from fetuses in utero to fully eroticized adults, all the way to celestial giants floating in space. Bersani illustrates his exploration of the body's capacities to receive and resist what is ostensibly alien using a typically eclectic set of sources, from literary icons like Marquis de Sade to cinematic provocateurs such as Bruno Dumont and Lars von Trier. This sharp and wide-ranging book will excite scholars of Freud, Foucault, and film studies, or anyone who has ever stopped to ponder the give and take of human corporeality.

William of Ockham (1287-1347) is oft considered the most important nominalist thinker of the Middle Ages. Nominalism, a metaphysical view that has had adherents throughout the history of Western philosophy, largely denies the extramental existence of universals and abstract objects by reducing them to linguistic or mental items. Philosopher Claude Panaccio views Ockham's genre of nominalism as consisting of three theses: that there are no universals in the external world, no relations, and no quantities considered as distinct entities. Claude Panaccio here displays the outlines of a rich and carefully crafted nominalist system that is still of great philosophical interest today. In so doing, the volume situates Ockham's thought with respect to several salient contemporary debates in philosophy. Ockham's Nominalism provides a unique systematic introduction to his thought about universals, relations, and quantities, situating his doctrines on these matters with respect to today's debates in metaphysics, philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and epistemology.

This Handbook is intended to show the links between the philosophy written in the Middle Ages and that being done today. Essays by over twenty medieval specialists, who are also familiar with contemporary discussions, explore areas in logic and philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, moral psychology ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy and philosophy of religion. Each topic has been chosen because it is of present philosophical interest, but a more or less similar set of questions was also discussed in the Middle Ages. No party-line has been set about the extent of the similarity. Some writers (e.g. Panaccio on Universals; Cesalli on States of Affairs) argue that there are the closest continuities. Others (e.g. Thom on Logical Form; Pink on Freedom of the Will) stress the differences. All, however, share the aim of providing new analyses of medieval texts and of writing in a manner that is clear and comprehensible to philosophers who are not medieval specialists. The Handbook begins with eleven chapters looking at the history of medieval philosophy period by period, and region by region. They constitute the fullest, most wide-ranging and up-to-date chronological survey of medieval philosophy available. All four traditions - Greek, Latin, Islamic and Jewish (in Arabic, and in Hebrew) - are considered, and the Latin tradition is traced from late antiquity through to the seventeenth century and beyond.

Eva Brann examines the great philosophers and their articulations of the idea of "will." The diversity of thought found in the roughly fifty writers considered here suggests that the term refers not to just one fixed constituent of the "soul," but to many senses--perhaps linked, perhaps disparate.

Presents a new, critical introduction to Machiavelli's thought for students of politics and philosophy. All students of Western political thought encounter Niccolo Machiavelli's work. Nevertheless, his writing continues to puzzle scholars and readers who are uncertain how to deal with the seeming paradoxes they encounter. The Political Philosophy of Niccolo Machiavelli is a clear account of Machiavelli's thought, major theories and central ideas. It critically engages with his work in a new way, one not based on the problematic Cambridge school approach. Geared towards the specific requirements of students who need to reach a sound understanding of Machiavelli's ideas, it is the ideal companion to the study of this influential and challenging philosopher. Introduces Machiavelli's life and the historical and theoretical context within which he developed his ideas; detailed examinations Machiavelli's most commonly encountered texts, including The Prince, The Discourses, The Florentine Histories and The Art of War; critically analyses Machiavelli's most important concepts and shows how they continue to reverberate within Western political philosophy and pays particular attention to Machiavelli's language and central themes such as Virtue, Fortune, Conflict, History and Religion.

This volume casts a new light on Byzantium as a geographical and cultural intersection. For nearly a millennium, Byzantium was an important crossroads where cultures, people, and institutions from the entire Mediterranean area came together. Key subjects of interest explored by this volume include reciprocal cultural and epistemic processes of reception and transformation and the forms of knowledge associated with them.

Die menschliche Lebensfuhrung ist weder durch Wesenheiten vorherbestimmt noch eine beliebige Konstruktion. Sie bedarf der Aufdeckung der zum Leben notigen Moglichkeiten. Dieser Kategorische Konjunktiv beugt der unmenschlichen Verstetigung ungespielten Lachens und Weinens vor. Menschliche Lebewesen brauchen einen geschichtlichen Prozess, um ihre Natur offentlich herausproduzieren zu konnen. Die Wahrnehmung der ersten Person bedeutet Teilnahme an der Semiosis lebendiger Augenblicke. Diesseits von Naturalismus und Sprachidealismus wird hier der dritte Weg eines modernitatskritischen Philosophierens erkundet. Auf jenem Weg Philosophischer Anthropologie kommt der Geschlechterfrage ein hoher Stellenwert zu. Die Selbstermachtigung zur Produktion biologischer und soziokultureller Geschlechterbestimmungen hat ihre Grenzen am notigen Respekt vor unserer erotischen Leibesnatur."

St. Augustine, bishop of Hippo, is one of the central figures in the history of Christianity, and City of God is one of his greatest theological works. Written as an eloquent defence of the faith at a time when the Roman Empire was on the brink of collapse, it examines the ancient pagan religions of Rome, the arguments of the Greek philosophers and the revelations of the Bible. Pointing the way forward to a citizenship that transcends worldly politics and will last for eternity, City of God represents a dramatic turning point in the unfolding of Christian doctrine.

The new introduction by Gill Evans examines the text in the light of contemporary Greek and Roman thought and political change. It demonstrates the importance of religious and literary influences on St. Augustine and his significance as a Christian thinker.Includes new introduction, chronology, and bibliography