Thomas Williams presents the most extensive collection of John Duns Scotus's work on ethics and moral psychology available in English. John Duns Scotus: Selected Writings on Ethics includes extended discussions-and as far as possible, complete questions-on divine and human freedom, the moral attributes of God, the relationship between will and intellect, moral and intellectual virtue, practical reasoning, charity, the metaphysics of goodness and rightness, the various acts, affections, and passions of the will, justice, the natural law, sin, marriage and divorce, the justification for private property, and lying and perjury. Relying on the recently completed critical edition of the Ordinatio and other critically edited texts, this collection presents the most reliable and up-to-date versions of Scotus's work in an accessible and philosophically informed translation.

Alone among Thomas Aquinas' works, the Summa Theologiae contains well-developed and integrated discussions of metaphysics, ethics, law, human action, and the divine nature. The essays in this volume, by scholars representing varied approaches to the study of Aquinas, offer thorough, cutting-edge expositions and analyses of these topics and show how they relate to Aquinas' larger system of thought. The volume also examines the reception of the Summa Theologiae from the thirteenth century to the present day, showing how scholars have understood and misunderstood this key text - and how, even after seven centuries of interpretation, we still have much to learn from it. Detailed and accessible, this book will be highly important for scholars and students of medieval philosophy and theology.

The closely related problems of creativity and freedom have long been seen as emblematic of the Renaissance. Ullrich Langer, however, argues that French and Italian Renaissance literature can be profitably reconceived in terms of the way these problems are treated in late medieval scholasticism in general and nominalist theology in particular. Looking at a subject that is relatively unexplored by literary critics, Langer introduces the reader to some basic features of nominalist theology and uses these to focus on what we find to be "modern" in French and Italian literature of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Langer demonstrates that this literature, often in its most interesting moments, represents freedom from constraint in the figures of the poet and the reader and in the fictional world itself. In Langer's view, nominalist theology provides a set of concepts that helps us understand the intellectual context of that freedom: God, the secular sovereign, and the poet are similarly absolved of external necessity in their relationships to their worlds. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

In this portrait of the flamboyant Milanese courtier Francesco Filelfo (1398-1481), Diana Robin reveals a fifteenth-century humanism different from the cool, elegant classicism of Medicean Florence and patrician Venice. Although Filelfo served such heads of state as Pope Pius II, Cosimo de' Medici, and Francesco Sforza, his humanism was that of the "other"--the marginalized, exilic writer, whose extraordinary mind yet obscure origins made him a misfit at court. Through an exploration of Filelfo's disturbing montages in his letters and poems--of such events as the Milanese revolution of 1447 and the plague that swept Lombardy in 1451--Robin exposes the extent to which Filelfo, once viewed as an apologist for his patrons, criticized their militarism, sham republicanism, and professions of Christian piety. This study includes an examination of Filelfo's deeply layered references to Horace, Livy, Vergil, and Petrarch, as well as a comparison of Filelfo to other fifteenth-century Lombard writers, such as Cristoforo da Soldo, Pier Candido Decembrio, and Giovanni Simonetta. Here Robin presents her own editions of selections from Filelfo's Epistolae Familiares, Sforziad, Odae, and De Morali Disciplina, many of these texts appearing for the first time since the Renaissance. Originally published in 1991. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Hans Baron's Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance is widely considered one of the most important works in Italian Renaissance studies. Princeton University Press published this seminal book in 1955. Now the Press makes available a two-volume collection of eighteen of Professor Baron's essays, most of them thoroughly revised, unpublished, or presented in English for the first time. Spanning the larger part of his career, they provide a continuation of, and complement to, the earlier book. The essays demonstrate that, contemporaneously with the revolution in art, modern humanistic thought developed in the city-state climate of early Renaissance Florence to a far greater extent than has generally been assumed. The publication of these volumes is a major scholarly event: a reinforcement and amplification of the author's conception of civic Humanism. The book includes studies of medieval antecedents and special studies of Petrarch, Leonardo Bruni, and Leon Battista Alberti. It offers a thoroughly re-conceived profile of Machiavelli, drawn against the background of civic Humanism, as well as essays presenting evidence that French and English Humanism of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries was closely tied to Italian civic thought of the fifteenth. The work culminates in a reassessment of Jacob Burckhardt's pioneering thought on the Renaissance. Originally published in 1988. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Building on concepts developed in his previously published New Theory of Beauty, Guy Sircello constructs a bold and provocative theory of love in which the objects of love are the qualities that "bear" beauty and the pleasure of all love is "erotic," without being "sexual." The theory reveals a continuity of subject matter between premodern notions of love and modern notions of aesthetic pleasure, thus providing grounds for criticizing modern tendencies to isolate the aesthetic both culturally and psychologically and to separate it from its home in the human body. The author begins with an analysis of enjoyment that reduces all enjoyment to the enjoyment of the "experience of qualities." He explains how we experience qualities as "circulating" in a special form of "space" that includes our own bodies, the external world, and their interpenetration. Sircello generalizes this analysis to encompass all forms of love and grounds the pleasure of all love--aesthetic or nonaesthetic, personal or nonpersonal, sexual or nonsexual--in an experience of the form of an "overall bodily caress." Originally published in 1989. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

"Every page contains thought at a high level." -British Weekly Rudolf Steiner begins these three lectures by depicting the background of early Christian thought, from which scholastic philosophers arose. He focuses on the "unanswered question" of the scholastic movement: How can human thinking be made Christlike and develop toward a vision of the spiritual world? A study of subsequent European thought, especially that of Kant, leads to the possibility of deepening into spiritual perception the scientific thinking that arose from scholasticism. Steiner explains that, since the beginning of the twentieth century, this is true Christianity.

Quello delle sostanze corporee e degli animali e uno dei temi ricorrenti nella storiografia leibniziana degli ultimi anni: l'intento di questo lavoro e di estendere l'indagine anche alla botanica. L'interesse di Leibniz per lo studio del mondo vegetale e attestato da numerosi scritti, anche inediti, come le lettere di Leibniz al matematico R. C. Wagner, di cui si presenta in Appendice la trascrizione dell'originale in lingua latina. Tenendo sullo sfondo i principali sviluppi della botanica dell'epoca, la trattazione verte su due temi: l'evoluzione nel pensiero leibniziano del concetto di macchina naturale, dagli anni degli scritti di fisiologia agli sviluppi piu maturi, e il confronto tra Leibniz e Locke sulla botanica sistematica e sui problemi teorici ad essa connessi.

Natural moral law stands at the center of Western ethics and jurisprudence and plays a leading role in interreligious dialogue. Although the greatest source of the classical natural law tradition is Thomas Aquinas's Treatise on Law, the Treatise is notoriously difficult, especially for nonspecialists. J. Budziszewski has made this formidable work luminous. This book - the first classically styled, line-by-line commentary on the Treatise in centuries - reaches out to philosophers, theologians, social scientists, students, and general readers alike. Budziszewski shows how the Treatise facilitates a dialogue between author and reader. Explaining and expanding upon the text in light of modern philosophical developments, he expounds this work of the great thinker not by diminishing his reasoning, but by amplifying it.

Which language should philosophers use: technical or common language? In a book as important for intellectual historians as it is for philosophers, Lodi Nauta addresses a vital question which still has resonance today: is the discipline of philosophy assisted or disadvantaged by employing a special vocabulary? By the Middle Ages philosophy had become a highly technical discipline, with its own lexicon and methods. The Renaissance humanist critique of this specialised language has been dismissed as philosophically superficial, but the author demonstrates that it makes a crucial point: it is through the misuse of language that philosophical problems arise. He charts the influence of this critique on early modern philosophers, including Hobbes and Locke, and shows how it led to the downfall of medieval Aristotelianism and the gradual democratization of language and knowledge. His book will be essential reading for anyone interested in the transition from medieval to modern philosophy.

Calvin's 1559 Institutes is one of the most important works of theology that emerged at a pivotal time in Europe's history. As a movement, Calvinism has often been linked to the emerging features of modernity, especially to capitalism, rationalism, disenchantment, and the formation of the modern sovereign state. In this book, Michelle Sanchez argues that a closer reading of the 1559 Institutes recalls some of the tensions that marked Calvinism's emergence among refugees, and ultimately opens new ways to understand the more complex ethical and political legacy of Calvinism. In conversation with theorists of practice and signification, she advocates for reading the Institutes as a pedagogical text that places the reader in the world as the domain in which to actively pursue the 'knowledge of God and ourselves' through participatory uses of divine revelation. Through this lens, she reconceives Calvin's understanding of sovereignty and how it works in relation to the embodied reader. Sanchez also critically examines Calvin's teaching on providence and the incarnation in conversation with theorists of political theology and modernity who emphasize the importance of those very doctrines.

Die Autorin bietet in ihren einfuhrenden philosophischen Reflexionen eine Auswahl an klassischen und modernen Themen der AEsthetik: Dialektik der Aufklarung, Kunst nahe am Verstummen, Begriffsgeschichte des Schoenen und andere. In zehn Kapiteln werden Zitate durch kommentierende Abschnitte verbunden. Dabei geht das Buch nicht fortlaufend argumentierend vor, sondern prasentiert sich vielmehr als Collage. Jedem Kapitel ist ein literarisches Motto vorangestellt. Es soll den Gefuhlsraum zeigen, in dem sich AEsthetik dann bewegt. Gegenwartige Kunst als kritische Instanz verweist auf die Autonomie der AEsthetik, die stets Tendenzen abwehren muss, welche sie einzuschranken oder gar zu vernichten drohen: dies waren und sind hauptsachlich autoritar-politische Vereinnahmungen.

Petrarch was one of the founding fathers of Renaissance humanism, yet the nature and significance of his ideas are still widely debated. In this book, Gur Zak examines two central issues in Petrarch's works - his humanist philosophy and his concept of the self. Zak argues that both are defined by Petrarch's idea of care for the self. Overcome by a strong sense of fragmentation, Petrarch turned to the ancient idea that philosophy can bring harmony and wholeness to the soul through the use of spiritual exercises in the form of writing. Examining his vernacular poetry and his Latin works from both literary and historical perspectives, Zak explores Petrarch's attempts to use writing as a spiritual exercise, how his spiritual techniques absorbed and transformed ancient and medieval traditions of writing, and the tensions that arose from his efforts to care for the self through writing.

Die kantische Freiheitsphilosophie stellt eine sakulare Fassung der christlichen Freiheitslehre dar. Diese hat zwei unterschiedliche Grundbegriffe der Freiheit herausgearbeitet: die Freiheit der Wahl zwischen Gut und Boese und die moralische Freiheit. Im Hauptstrom seiner Philosophie stellt Kant allerdings nur den letzten und nicht den ersten Freiheitsbegriff in den Mittelpunkt seines Interesses. Damit entzieht er seiner Moralphilosophie und seiner Rechtslehre ihr eigentliches Fundament und kann dieses Defizit nur in seiner Religionsschrift annahernd ausgleichen. Das umfassende Problem der Freiheit bei Kant diskutiert der Verfasser vor dem Hintergrund zweier, fur das Christentum fundamentaler Freiheitslehren: der von Augustinus und der von Luther.

Obwohl der Mundigkeitsbegriff seine herausragende Stellung in der erziehungswissenschaftlichen Diskussion mittlerweile eingebusst hat, ist er immer noch als Erziehungsziel gegenwartig. Wer von Mundigkeit redet, meint - mal mehr, mal weniger explizit - das Verantwortung begrundende Freiheitsvermoegen, sich selbst regieren zu koennen. Angenommen, die moderne Hirnforschung hatte Recht und Freiheit ware tatsachlich nur eine Illusion, musste mit der Unmoeglichkeit von Freiheit und Verantwortung konsequenterweise auch der Mundigkeitsbegriff verworfen werden. Kants Idee der Freiheit zeigt, warum Freiheit trotz (neuronaler) Determination widerspruchsfrei gedacht werden kann. Diese Fundierung des Mundigkeitsbegriffs in der Idee der Freiheit schrankt zugleich auch die Bandbreite dessen ein, was Mundigkeit sein kann und nimmt dem Begriff so seine Beliebigkeit.

This is a new translation of and commentary on Pico della Mirandola's most famous work, the Oration on the Dignity of Man. It is the first English edition to provide readers with substantial notes on the text, essays that address the work's historical, philosophical and theological context, and a survey of its reception. Often called the 'Manifesto of the Renaissance', this brief but complex text was originally composed in 1486 as the inaugural speech for an assembly of intellectuals, which could have produced one of the most exhaustive metaphysical, theological and psychological debates in history, had Pope Innocent VIII not forbidden it. This edition of the Oration reflects the spirit of the original text in bringing together experts in different fields. Not unlike the debate Pico optimistically anticipated, the resulting work is superior to the sum of its parts.

This compact collection of philosophical texts from the Summa Theologica --on God, creation, the soul, human acts, moral good and evil, love, habits, virtue, and law--is presented newly translated in abridged form and cast in a modified version of the medieval quaestio . Included are only the most important objections and Aquinas' replies; appeals to scriptural, theological, and philosophical authorities have been omitted. Unlike the ordering of the originals, questions and answers are here presented prior to objections and replies; the result is a sharp, rich, topically organized question-answer presentation of Aquinas' major philosophical arguments within a brief compass. A general Introduction, headnotes, a glossary, an index, and a select bibliography offer expert guidance to the work of this major philosopher.

Hegel's Encyclopaedia Logic constitutes the foundation of the system of philosophy presented in his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Together with his Science of Logic, it contains the most explicit formulation of his enduringly influential dialectical method and of the categorical system underlying his thought. It offers a more compact presentation of his dialectical method than is found elsewhere, and also incorporates changes that he would have made to the second edition of the Science of Logic if he had lived to do so. This volume presents it in a new translation with a helpful introduction and notes. It will be a valuable reference work for scholars and students of Hegel and German idealism, as well as for those who are interested in the post-Hegelian character of contemporary philosophy.

Aristotle is generally considered a philosopher whose authority was regognized in the Middle Ages. However, in the sixteenth century alone, more works on Aristotle than throughout the preceding 1000 years were produced. Moreover, the medieval Latin translations were supplanted by new texts. Thus, the entire corpus was made accessible in contemporary Latin before 1600. The whole of Aristotle's oeuvre was subjected to the philosophical reorientation of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries; eventually the new readings of his works influenced contemporary thought on dialectic, science, poetics etc. In thirteen articles, the authors discuss the changing interpretations of Aristotle's works and his influence on various disciplines, from Dante and until the seventeenth century. With contributions by Sten Ebbesen, Antonis Fyrigos, Kristian Jensen, Eckhard Kessler, Bo Lindberg, David A. Lines, Marianne Marcussen, Heikki Mikkeli, John Monfasani, Olaf Pluta, Gert Sorensen, Cesare Vasoli, and Peter Wagner. Text in English and Italian (two articles).

In 1968, at the climax of the sixties, Os Guinness visited the United States for the first time. There he was struck by an impression he'd already felt in England and elsewhere: beneath all the idealism and struggle for freedom was a growing disillusionment and loss of meaning. "Underneath the efforts of a generation," he wrote, "lay dust." Even more troubling, Christians seemed uninformed about the cultural shifts and ill-equipped to respond. Guinness took on these concerns by writing his first book, The Dust of Death. In this milestone work, leading social critic Guinness provides a wide-ranging, farsighted analysis of one of the most pivotal decades in Western history, the 1960s. He examines the twentieth-century developments of secular humanism, the technological society, and the alternatives offered by the counterculture, including radical politics, Eastern religions, and psychedelic drugs. As all of these options have increasingly failed to deliver on their promises, Guinness argues, Westerners desperately need another alternative-a Third Way. This way "holds the promise of realism without despair, involvement without frustration, hope without romanticism." It offers a stronger humanism, one with a solid basis for its ideals, combining truth and beauty. And this Third Way can be found only in the rediscovery and revival of the historic Christian faith. First published in 1973, The Dust of Death is now back in print as part of the IVP Signature Collection, featuring a new design and new preface by the author. This classic will help readers of every generation better understand the cultural trajectory that continues to shape us and how Christians can still offer a better way.