This book addresses an emblematic case of a potential faith-reason, or faith-science, conflict that never arose, even though the biblical passage in question runs counter to simple common sense. Within the context of Western culture, when one speaks of a faith-science conflict one is referring to cases in which a "new" scientific theory or the results of empirical research call into question what the Bible states on the same subject. Well-known examples include the Copernican theory of planetary motion and the Darwinian theory of evolution. The passage considered in this book, concerning the "waters above the firmament" in the description of the creation in the first book of Genesis, represents a uniquely enlightening case. The author traces the interpretations of this passage from the early centuries of the Christian era to the late Renaissance, and discusses them within their historical context. In the process, he also clarifies the underlying cosmogonic model. Throughout this period, only exegetes belonging to various religious orders discussed the passage's meaning. The fact that it was never debated within the lay culture explains its non-emergence as a faith-reason conflict. A fascinating and highly accessible work, this book will appeal to a broad readership.

Giordano Bruno was burnt at the stake in Rome in 1600, accused of heresy by the Inquisition. His life took him from Italy to Northern Europe and England, and finally to Venice, where he was arrested. His six dialogues in Italian, which today are considered a turning point towards the philosophy and science of the modern world, were written during his visit to Elizabethan London, as a gentleman attendant to the French Ambassador, Michel de Castelnau. He died refusing to recant views which he defined as philosophical rather than theological, and for which he claimed liberty of expression. The papers in this volume derive from a conference held in London to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Bruno's death. A number focus specifically on his experience in England, while others look at the Italian context of his thought and his impact upon others. Together they constitute a major new survey of the range of Bruno's philosophical activity, as well as evaluating his use of earlier cultural traditions and his influence on both contemporary and more modern themes and trends.

Platonic love is a concept that has profoundly shaped Western literature, philosophy and intellectual history for centuries. First developed in the Symposium and the Phaedrus, it was taken up by subsequent thinkers in antiquity, entered the theological debates of the Middle Ages, and played a key role in the reception of Neoplatonism and the etiquette of romantic relationships during the Italian Renaissance. In this wide-ranging reference work, a leading team of international specialists examines the Platonic distinction between higher and lower forms of eros, the role of the higher form in the ascent of the soul and the concept of Beauty. They also treat the possibilities for friendship and interpersonal love in a Platonic framework, as well as the relationship between love, rhetoric and wisdom. Subsequent developments are explored in Plutarch, Plotinus, Augustine, Pseudo-Dionysius, Eriugena, Aquinas, Ficino, della Mirandola, Castiglione and the contra amorem tradition.

Nicholas of Cusa is known as one of the most original philosophers of the 15th century, but by training he was a canon lawyer who received his degree from the University of Padua in 1423. The essays in this book analyse his legal and political ideas against the background of medieval religious, legal and political thought and its development in the Renaissance. The first two pieces deal with the legal ideas and humanism that affected Cusanus and with some of the problems faced by 15th-century lawyers, including his friends. The central section of the book also discusses how he reacted to the religious, legal and political issues of his day; Cusanus as reformer of the Church is a theme that runs through many of the essays. The final studies look at some of Cusanus' contemporaries, with special emphasis on Gregor Heimburg, the sharpest critic of Cusanus.

The thirteenth-century allegorical dream vision, the Roman de la Rose, transformed how medieval literary texts engaged with philosophical ideas. Written in Old French, its influence dominated French, English and Italian literature for the next two centuries, serving in particular as a model for Chaucer and Dante. Jean de Meun's section of this extensive, complex and dazzling work is notable for its sophisticated responses to a whole host of contemporary philosophical debates. This collection brings together literary scholars and historians of philosophy to produce the most thorough, interdisciplinary study to date of how the Rose uses poetry to articulate philosophical problems and positions. This wide-ranging collection demonstrates the importance of the poem for medieval intellectual history and offers new insights into the philosophical potential both of the Rose specifically and of medieval poetry as a whole.

This new Companion to Aquinas features entirely new chapters written by internationally recognized experts in the field. It shows the power of Aquinas's philosophical thought and transmits the worldview which he inherited, developed, altered, and argued for, while at the same time revealing to contemporary philosophers the strong connections which there are between Aquinas's interests and views and their own. Its five sections cover the life and works of Aquinas; his metaphysics, including his understanding of the ultimate foundations of reality; his metaethics and ethics, including his virtue ethics; his account of human nature; his theory of the afterlife; his epistemology and his theory of the intellectual virtues; his view of the nature of free will and the relation of grace to free will; and finally some key components of his philosophical theology, including the incarnation and atonement, Christology, and the nature of original sin.

In this innovative book, Gloria Frost reconstructs and analyses Aquinas's theories on efficient causation and causal powers, focusing specifically on natural causal powers and efficient causation in nature. Frost presents each element of Aquinas's theories one by one, comparing them with other theories, as well as examining the philosophical and interpretive ambiguities in Aquinas's thought and proposing fresh solutions to conceptual difficulties. Her discussion includes explanations of Aquinas's technical scholastic terminology in jargon-free prose, as well as background on medieval scientific views - including ordinary language explanations of the medieval physical theories which Aquinas assumed in formulating his views on causation and causal powers. The resulting volume is a rich exploration of a central philosophical topic in medieval philosophy and beyond, and will be valuable especially for scholars and advanced students working on Aquinas and on medieval natural philosophy.

Chris Schabel presents a detailed analysis of the radical solution given by the Franciscan Peter Auriol to the problem of reconciling divine foreknowledge with the contingency of the future, and of contemporary reactions to it. Auriol's solution appeared to many of his contemporaries to deny God's knowledge of the future altogether, and so it provoked intense and long-lasting controversy; Schabel is the first to examine in detail the philosophical and theological background to Auriol's discussion, and to provide a full analysis of Auriol's own writings on the question and the immediate reactions to them. This book sheds new light both on one of the central philosophical debates of the Middle Ages, and on theology and philosophy at the University of Paris in the first half of the 14th century, a period of Parisian intellectual life which has been largely neglected until now.

Professor Gutas deals here with the lives, sayings, thought, and doctrines of Greek philosophers drawn from sources preserved in medieval Arabic translations and for the most part not extant in the original. The Arabic texts, some of which are edited here for the first time, are translated throughout and richly annotated with the purpose of making the material accessible to classical scholars and historians of ancient and medieval philosophy. Also discussed are the modalities of transmission from Greek into Arabic, the diffusion of the translated material within the Arabic tradition, the nature of the Arabic sources containing the material, and methodological questions relating to Graeco-Arabic textual criticism. The philosophers treated include the Presocratics and minor schools such as Cynicism, Plato, Aristotle and the early Peripatos, and thinkers of late antiquity. A final article presents texts on the malady of love drawn from both the medical and philosophical (problemata physica) traditions.

This volume deals with the psychological, metaphysical and scientific ideas of two major and influential Aristotelian philosophers of the Italian Renaissance - Nicoletto Vernia (d. 1499) and Agostino Nifo (ca 1470-1538) - whose careers must be seen as inter-related. Both began by holding Averroes to be the true interpreter of Aristotle's thought, but were influenced by the work of humanists, such as Ermolao Barbaro, though to a different degree. Translations of the Greek commentators on Aristotle (Alexander of Aphrodisias, Themistius and Simplicius) provided them with new material and new ways of understanding Aristotle - Nifo even put himself to learning Greek - and led them to abandon Averroes, especially as regards his views on the soul and intellect. Nevertheless, both Vernia and Nifo engaged seriously with the thought of medieval scholars such as Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas and John of Jandun. Both also showed interest in their celebrated contemporary, Marsilio Ficino.

This volume brings together Professor Cranz's published studies on Nicholas of Cusa with a set of seven papers left unpublished at the time of his death. Their subjects are the speculative thought of Cusanus and his relationship with the broader themes of the Renaissance. Particular attention is given to patterns of development in Cusanus' thought as he wrestled with problems of divine transcendence and the limits of human capacities. Overall, these studies also reveal Professor Cranz's interest in the larger changes in Western modes of thought during the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, which define our ways of thinking as different from those of Antiquity.

In A Comparative Analysis of Cicero and Aquinas, Charles P. Nemeth investigates how, despite their differences, these two figures may be the most compatible brothers in ideas ever conceived in the theory of natural law. Looking to find common threads that run between the philosophies of these two great thinkers of the Classical and Medieval periods, this book aims to determine whether or not there exists a common ground whereby ethical debates and dilemmas can be evaluated. Does comparison between Cicero and Aquinas offer a new pathway for moral measure, based on defined and developed principles? Do they deliver certain moral and ethical principles for human life to which each agree? Instead of a polemical diatribe, comparison between Cicero and Aquinas may edify a method of compromise and afford a more or less restrictive series of judgements about ethical quandaries.

Charles Trinkaus can be counted among the eminent intellectual and cultural historians of the Renaissance. This new collection of his articles brings together pieces published since 1982. The studies are concerned with Italian Renaissance humanists and philosophers who tended to affirm human capacities to shape earthly existence, despite the traditional limitations proposed by some scholastics and astrologers. Professor Trinkaus holds that, without abandoning their Christian faith, or their acceptance of physical influences from the cosmos, these writers, in their stress on human capacities, were responding to the vigorous activism of their contemporaries in all aspects of their existence. The final four papers also provide a series of reflections on the modern historiography of the Renaissance.

Thomas Aquinas produced a voluminous body of work on moral theory, and much of that work is on virtue, particularly the status and value of the virtues as principles of virtuous acts, and the way in which a moral life can be organized around them schematically. Thomas Osborne presents Aquinas's account of virtue in its historical, philosophical and theological contexts, to show the reader what Aquinas himself wished to teach about virtue. His discussion makes the complexities of Aquinas's moral thought accessible to readers despite the differences between Thomas's texts themselves, and the distance between our background assumptions and his. The book will be valuable for scholars and students in ethics, medieval philosophy, and theology.

John Calvin lived in a divided world when past certainties were crumbling. Calvin claimed that his thought was completely based upon scripture, but he was mistaken. At several points in his thought and his ministry, he set his own foundations upon tradition. His efforts to make sense of his culture and its religious life mirror issues that modern Western cultures face, and that have contributed to our present situation. In this book, R. Ward Holder offers new insights into Calvin's successes and failures and suggests pathways for understanding some of the problems of contemporary Western culture such as the deep divergence about living in tradition, the modern capacity to agree on the foundations of thought, and even the roots of our deep political polarization. He traces Calvin's own critical engagement with the tradition that had formed him and analyzes the inherent divisions in modern heritage that affect our ability to agree, not only religiously or politically, but also about truth. An epilogue comparing biblical interpretation with Constitutional interpretation is illustrative of contemporary issues and demonstrates how historical understanding can offer solutions to tensions in modern culture.

'He who thinks freely for himself, honours all freedom on earth.' Stefan Zweig was already an emigre-driven from a Europe torn apart by brutality and totalitarianism-when he found, in a damp cellar, a copy of Michel de Montaigne's Essais. Montaigne would become Zweig's last great occupation, helping him make sense of his own life and his obsessions-with personal freedom, with the sanctity of the individual. Through his writings on suicide, he would also, finally, lead Zweig to his death. With the intense psychological acuity and elegant prose so characteristic of Zweig's fiction, this account of Montaigne's life asks how we ought to think, and how to live. It is an intense and wonderful insight into both subject and biographer.

Like any other group of philosophers, scholastic thinkers from the Middle Ages disagreed about even the most fundamental of concepts. With their characteristic style of rigorous semantic and logical analysis, they produced a wide variety of diverse theories about a huge number of topics. The Routledge Companion to Medieval Philosophy offers readers an outstanding survey of many of these diverse theories, on a wide array of subjects. Its 35 chapters, all written exclusively for this Companion by leading international scholars, are organized into seven parts: I Language and Logic II Metaphysics III Cosmology and Physics IV Psychology V Cognition VI Ethics and Moral Philosophy VII Political Philosophy In addition to shedding new light on the most well-known philosophical debates and problems of the medieval era, the Companion brings to the fore topics that may not traditionally be associated with scholastic philosophy, but were in fact a veritable part of the tradition. These include chapters covering scholastic theories about propositions, atomism, consciousness, and democracy and representation. The Routledge Companion to Medieval Philosophy is a helpful, comprehensive introduction to the field for undergraduate students and other newcomers as well as a unique and valuable resource for researchers in all areas of philosophy.

The essays in this book discuss a number of the central metaphysical and ethical themes that engaged the minds of Platonist philosophers during late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. One particular theme is that of the structure of reality, with the associated questions of the relations between soul and body and between intelligible and sensible reality, and the existence of mathematical objects. Other topics relate to evil and beauty, political life and its purpose, the philosophical search for the absolute Good, and how one can speak about this Absolute and have union with it. Going from Plato to Eriugena, the ways in which Platonist philosophers understood and developed these themes are analysed and compared.

We turn to Machiavelli at every tumultuous period in history - he is the one who knows how to philosophize in dark times. In fact, since his death in 1527, we have never stopped reading him, always to pull ourselves out of a torpor. But what do we really know about this man? Is there more to his work than that term for political evil, Machiavellianism? It was Machiavelli's luck to be disappointed by every statesman he encountered - that was why he had to create his paper Prince. Today, the question that remains is not why he wrote, but for whom - for princes or for those who want to resist them? What is the art of governing? Is it to take power, or to keep it? In this timely book, Patrick Boucheron undoes many of our assumptions about Machiavelli, showing how his rich, complex thought is key to understanding his time, and may be crucial to interrogating our own.

The volume results from a seminar sponsored by the 'Foundation for Intellectual History' at the Herzog August Bibliothek, WolfenbA1/4ttel, in 1992. Starting with the theory of regressus as displayed in its most developed form by William Wallace, these papers enter the vast field of the Renaissance discussion on method as such in its historical and systematical context. This is confined neither to the notion of method in the strict sense, nor to the Renaissance in its exact historical limits, nor yet to the Aristotelian tradition as a well defined philosophical school, but requires a new scholarly approach. Thus - besides Galileo, Zabarella and their circles, which are regarded as being crucial for the 'emergence of modern science' in the end of the 16th century - the contributors deal with the ancient and medieval origins as well as with the early modern continuity of the Renaissance concepts of method and with 'non-regressive' methodologies in the various approaches of Renaissance natural philosophy, including the Lutheran and Calvinist traditions.

The papers collected in this volume fall into three main groups. Those in the first group are concerned with the origin and early development of the idea of natural rights. The author argues here that the idea first grew into existence in the writings of the 12th-century canonists. The articles in the second group discuss miscellaneous aspects of medieval law and political thought. They include an overview of modern work on late medieval canon law. The final group of articles is concerned with the history of papal infallibility, with especial reference to the tradition of Franciscan ecclesiology and the contributions of John Peter Olivi and William of Ockham.