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Books > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Western philosophy, c 500 to c 1600 > General
The name Erasmus of Rotterdam conjures up a golden age of scholarly
integrity and the disinterested pursuit of knowledge, when learning
could command public admiration without the need for authorial
self-promotion. Lisa Jardine, however, shows that Erasmus
self-consciously created his own reputation as the central figure
of the European intellectual world. Erasmus himself--the historical
as opposed to the figural individual--was a brilliant, maverick
innovator, who achieved little formal academic recognition in his
own lifetime. What Jardine offers here is not only a fascinating
study of Erasmus but also a bold account of a key moment in Western
history, a time when it first became possible to believe in the
existence of something that could be designated "European thought."
The French author Michel de Montaigne is widely regarded as the
founder and greatest practitioner of the personal essay. A member
of the minor aristocracy, he worked as a judicial investigator,
served as mayor of Bordeaux, and sought to bring stability to his
war-torn country during the latter half of the sixteenth century.
He is best known today, however, as the author of the Essays, a
vast collection of meditations on topics ranging from love and
sexuality to freedom, learning, doubt, self-scrutiny, and peace of
mind. One of the most original books ever to emerge from Europe,
Montaigne's masterpiece has been continuously and powerfully
influential among writers and philosophers from its first
appearance down to the present day. His extraordinary curiosity and
discernment, combined with his ability to mix thoughtful judgment
with revealing anecdote, make him one of the most readable of all
writers. In Montaigne: A Very Short Introduction, William M. Hamlin
provides an overview of Montaigne's life, thought, and writing,
situating the Essays within the arc of Montaigne's lived experience
and focusing on themes of particular interest for contemporary
readers. Designed for a broad audience, this introduction will
appeal to first-time students of Montaigne as well as to seasoned
experts and admirers. Well-informed and lucidly written, Hamlin's
book offers an ideal point of entry into the life and work of the
world's first and most extraordinary essayist.
In the history of Western thought, men have persistently asked
three questions concerning the habitable earth and their
relationships to it. Is the earth, which is obviously a fit
environment for man and other organic life, a purposefully made
creation? Have its climates, its relief, the configuration of its
continents influenced the moral and social nature of individuals,
and have they had an influence in molding the character and nature
of human culture? In his long tenure of the earth, in what manner
has man changed it from its hypothetical pristine condition? From
the time of the Greeks to our own, answers to these questions have
been and are being given so frequently and so continually that we
may restate them in the form of general ideas: the idea of a
designed earth; the idea of environmental influence; and the idea
of man as a geographic agent. These ideas have come from the
general thought and experience of men, but the first owes much to
mythology, theology, and philosophy; the second, to pharmaceutical
lore, medicine, and weather observation; the third, to the plans,
activities, and skills of everyday life such as cultivation,
carpentry, and weaving. The first two ideas were expressed
frequently in antiquity, the third less so, although it was
implicit in many discussions which recognized the obvious fact that
men through their arts, sciences, and techniques had changed the
physical environment about them. This magnum opus of Clarence
Glacken explores all of these questions from Ancient Times to the
End of the Eighteenth Century.
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 Vatican Mythographers offers the first complete English
translation of three important sources of knowledge about the
survival of classical mythology from the Carolingian era to the
High Middle Ages and beyond. The Latin texts were discovered in
manuscripts in the Vatican library and published together in the
nineteenth century. The three so-called Vatican Mythographers
compiled, analyzed, interpreted, and transmitted a vast collection
of myths for use by students, poets, and artists. In terms
consonant with Christian purposes, they elucidated the fabulous
narratives and underlying themes in the works of Ovid, Virgil,
Statius, and other poets of antiquity. In so doing, the Vatican
Mythographers provided handbooks that included descriptions of
ancient rites and customs, curious etymologies, and, above all,
moral allegories. Thus we learn that Bacchus is a naked youth who
rides a tiger because drunkenness is never mature, denudes us of
possessions, and begets ferocity; or that Ulysses, husband of
Penelope, passed by the monstrous Scylla unharmed because a wise
man bound to chastity overcomes lust. The extensive collection of
myths illustrates how this material was used for moral lessons. To
date, the works of the Vatican Mythographers have remained
inaccessible to scholars and students without a good working
knowledge of Latin. The translation thus fulfills a scholarly void.
It is prefaced by an introduction that discusses the purposes of
the Vatican Mythographers, the influences on them, and their place
in medieval and Renaissance mythography. Of course, it also
entertains with a host of stories whose undying appeal captivates,
charms, inspires, instructs, and sometimes horrifiesus.The book
should have wide appeal for a whole range of university courses
involving myth.
This monograph presents new material on Francisco Suarez's
comprehensive theory of sense perception. The core theme is
perceptual intentionality in Suarez's theory of the senses,
external and internal, as presented in his Commentaria una cum
quaestionibus in libros Aristotelis De anima published in 1621. The
author targets the question of the multistage genesis of perceptual
acts by considering the ontological "items" involved in the
procession of sensory information. However, the structural issue is
not left aside, and the nature of the relationship due to which our
perceptions are mental representations of this or that object is
also considered. The heuristic historiographical background
includes not only the theories of classical authors, such as
Aristotle and Aquinas, but also those of late medieval authors of
the fourteenth century. These are headed by John Duns Scotus, John
of Jandun, Peter Auriol and Peter John Olivi. Readers will discover
the differences between Suarez's and Aquinas's views, as well as
other sources that may have served as positive inspiration for the
Jesuit's theory. By considering the late medieval philosophy of the
fourteenth century, this book helps, to a certain extent, to fill a
gap in the historiography of philosophy regarding the link between
late medieval and early modern scholasticism. In the first part of
the book, the metaphysics of the soul and powers is considered.
Chapters on the external senses follow, covering topics such as the
sensible species, the causes of sensation, self-awareness, and the
ordering of the external senses. A further chapter is devoted to
the internal senses and the author argues that by reducing the
number and functional scope of the interior senses Suarez deepens
the gap between the external senses and the intellect, but he
reduces it through emphasizing the unifying efficacy of the
soul.This book brings a synthetic and unifying perspective to
contemporary research and will particularly appeal to graduate
students and researchers in theology and philosophy, especially
philosophy of mind.
John Duns Scotus is commonly recognized as one of the most original
thinkers of medieval philosophy. His influence on subsequent
philosophers and theologians is enormous and extends well beyond
the limits of the Middle Ages. His thought, however, might be
intimidating for the non-initiated, because of the sheer number of
topics he touched on and the difficulty of his style. The eleven
essays collected here, especially written for this volume by some
of the leading scholars in the field, take the reader through
various topics, including Duns Scotus's intellectual environment,
his argument for the existence of God, and his conceptions of
modality, order, causality, freedom, and human nature. This volume
provides a reliable point of entrance to the thought of Duns Scotus
while giving a snapshot of some of the best research that is now
being done on this difficult but intellectually rewarding thinker.
The main purpose of this book is to investigate, from the
philosophical point of view, the concept of mind in some quickly
developing fields of contemporary science, from physics and
cosmology to biology and cognitive science. New scientific
investigations have brought many empirical results that help to
explain natural phenomena from quantum states to human thinking,
yet the question of the nature of the mind itself is still open. In
this book, the authors discuss several philosophical problems
raised or reformulated by recent scientific discoveries. The
authors use an interdisciplinary and holistic approach that bridges
the gap between scientific and humanistic pictures of the mind.
Unfolding as a series of materially oriented studies ranging from
chairs, machines and doors to trees, animals and food, this book
retells the story of Renaissance personhood as one of material
relations and embodied experience, rather than of emergent notions
of individuality and freedom. The book assembles an international
team of leading scholars to formulate a new account of personhood
in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, one that starts with
the objects, environments and physical processes that made
personhood legible.
Desiderius Erasmus (1466-1536) was a Dutch humanist, scholar, and
social critic, and one of the most important figures of the
Renaissance. The Praise of Folly is perhaps his best-known work.
Originally written to amuse his friend Sir Thomas More, this
satiric celebration of pleasure, youth, and intoxication
irreverently pokes fun at the pieties of theologians and the
foibles that make us all human, while ultimately reaffirming the
value of Christian ideals. No other book displays quite so
completely the transition from the medieval to the modern world,
and Erasmus's wit, wisdom, and critical spirit have lost none of
their timeliness today. This Princeton Classics edition of The
Praise of Folly features a new foreword by Anthony Grafton that
provides an essential introduction to this iridescent and enduring
masterpiece.
This volume is a collection of essays on a special theme in
Aristotelian philosophy of mind: the internal senses. The first
part of the volume is devoted to the central question of whether or
not any internal senses exist in Aristotle's philosophy of mind
and, if so, how many and how they are individuated. The provocative
claim of chapter one is that Aristotle recognizes no such internal
sense. His medieval Latin interpreters, on the other hand, very
much thought that Aristotle did introduce a number of internal
senses as shown in the second chapter. The second part of the
volume contains a number of case studies demonstrating the
philosophical background of some of the most influential topics
covered by the internal senses in the Aristotelian tradition and in
contemporary philosophy of mind. The focus of the case studies is
on memory, imagination and estimation. Chapters introduce the
underlying mechanisms of memory and recollection taking its cue
from Aristotle but reaching into early modern philosophy as well as
studying composite imagination in Avicenna's philosophy of mind.
Further topics include the Latin reception of Avicenna's estimative
faculty and the development of the internal senses as well as
offering an account of the logic of objects of imagination.
Critically engaging the thought of Heidegger, Gadamer, and others,
William Franke contributes both to the criticism of Dante's "Divine
Comedy" and to the theory of interpretation.
Reading the poem through the lens of hermeneutical theory, Franke
focuses particularly on Dante's address to the reader as the site
of a disclosure of truth. The event of the poem for its reader
becomes potentially an experience of truth both human and divine.
While contemporary criticism has concentrated on the historical
character of Dante's poem, often insisting on it as undermining the
poem's claims to transcendence, Franke argues that precisely the
poem's historicity forms the ground for its mediation of a
religious revelation. Dante's dramatization, on an epic scale, of
the act of interpretation itself participates in the
self-manifestation of the Word in poetic form.
"Dante's Interpretive Journey" is an indispensable addition to the
field of Dante studies and offers rich insights for philosophy and
theology as well.
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