As the final work by Ye Xiushan, one of the most famous philosophers and scholars of philosophy in China, this two-volume set scrutinizes the historical development of both Chinese and Western philosophy, aiming to explore the convergence between the two philosophical traditions. Combining historical examination and argumentation based on philosophical problematics, the author discusses the key figures and schools of thought from both traditions. Far from being a cursory comparison between different philosophical concepts and categories, the author discusses the logical paths and conceptual approaches of the two traditions on the same philosophical issues, thus giving insights into conceptual categories commonly used in both Chinese and Western philosophies. The two volumes illuminate the different core spirits and dilemmas of Western philosophy and Chinese philosophy, encouraging a constructive dialogue between the two and a new transformation of Chinese philosophy in itself. The title will appeal to scholars, students, and general readers interested in philosophical history, comparative philosophy, Chinese philosophy, and Western philosophy ranging over Greek philosophy, German classic philosophy, and contemporary continental philosophy.

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.

This book describes how and why the early modern period witnessed the marginalisation of astrology in Western natural philosophy, and the re-adoption of the cosmological view of the existence of a plurality of worlds in the universe, allowing the possibility of extraterrestrial life. Founded in the mid-1990s, the discipline of astrobiology combines the search for extraterrestrial life with the study of terrestrial biology - especially its origins, its evolution and its presence in extreme environments. This book offers a history of astrobiology's attempts to understand the nature of life in a larger cosmological context. Specifically, it describes the shift of early modern cosmology from a paradigm of celestial influence to one of celestial inhabitation. Although these trends are regarded as consequences of Copernican cosmology, and hallmarks of a modern world view, they are usually addressed separately in the historical literature. Unlike others, this book takes a broad approach that examines the relationship of the two. From Influence to Inhabitation will benefit both historians of astrology and historians of the extraterrestrial life debate, an audience which includes researchers and advanced students studying the history and philosophy of astrobiology. It will also appeal to historians of natural philosophy, science, astronomy and theology in the early modern period.

David Lindberg presents the first critical edition of the text of Roger Bacon's classic work Perspectiva, prepared from Latin manuscripts, accompanied by a facing-page English translation, critical notes, and a full study of the text. Also included is an analysis of Bacon's sources, influence, and role in the emergence of the discipline of perspectiva. About Roger Bacon: Roger Bacon (c.1220-c.1292) is one of the most renowned thinkers of the Middle Ages, a philosopher-scientist praised and mythologized for his attack on authority and his promotion of what he called experimental science. He was a leading figure in the intellectual life of the thirteenth century, a campaigner for educational reform, and a major disseminator of Greek and Arabic natural philosophy and mathematical science. About Perspectiva: The science that Roger Bacon most fully mastered was perspectiva, the study of light and vision (what would later become the science of optics). His great treatment of the subject, the Perspectiva, written in about 1260, was the first book by a European to display a full mastery of Greek and Arabic treatises on the subject, and through it Bacon was instrumental in defining this scientific discipline for the next 350 years.

Can human beings be free and responsible if there is a God? Anselm of Canterbury, the first Christian philosopher to propose that human beings have a really robust free will, offers viable answers to questions which have plagued religious people for at least two thousand years: If divine grace cannot be merited and is necessary to save fallen humanity, how can there be any decisive role for individual free choice to play? If God knows today what you are going to choose tomorrow, then when tomorrow comes you have to choose what God foreknew, so how can your choice be free? If human beings must have the option to choose between good and evil in order to be morally responsible, must God be able to choose evil? Anselm answers these questions with a sophisticated theory of free will which defends both human freedom and the sovereignty and goodness of God.

The Rotterdam City Library contains the world's largest collection of works by and about Desiderius Erasmus (1469?-1536), perhaps Rotterdam's most famous son. The origin of this unique collection dates back to the seventeenth century when the city fathers established a library in the Great or St. Laurence Church. This bibliography of the Erasmus collection lists, for the first time, all of the Rotterdam scholar's works and most of the studies written about him from his time to the present day. The collection is of vital importance to Erasmus studies and has, in many cases, provided the basic material for editions of Erasmus's complete works. In addition to the unique sixteenth-century printings listed in this book, the collection includes many translations into Estonian, Polish, Russian, Czech, Hebrew, and other languages. The Rotterdam Library has acquired publications about Erasmus that cover such topics as his life, work and times; his contemporaries; his humanism, pedagogy, pacifism, and theology; his relationship to Luther and the Reformation; and his influence on later periods. The collection numbers (as of 1989) roughly 5,000 works divided as follows: 2,500 works by Erasmus himself, 500 works edited by him, and 2,000 books and articles about him. This bibliographic resource will be of great value to Erasmus scholars, philosophy researchers, and historians studying the path of philosophical and religious thought.

Focusing on the 17th and 18th centuries, this volume centers around six ideological "isms" that the author seeks to exploit as well as deconstruct. The six "isms" are absolutism, constitutionalism, rationalism, empiricism, liberalism, and conservatism--all of which have long presented problematical "constructs" that the author seeks to "de-construct." The unusually broad range of famous thinkers studied here includes Hobbes, Locke, Richelieu, Bossuet, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Hume, Smith, Burke, and various French revolutionaries. Although the focus here is historical, the contemporary import of the subject is often brought out.

This volume inaugurates a new critical edition of the writings of the great English philosopher and sage Francis Bacon (1561-1626) - the first such complete edition for more than a hundred years. It contains six of Bacon's Latin scientific works, each accompanied by entirely new facing-page translations which, together with the extensive introduction and commentaries, offer fresh insights into one of the great minds of the early seventeenth century.

Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy is a volume of original articles on all aspects of ancient philosophy. The articles may be of substantial length, and include critical notices of major books. From 2000, OSAP is being published not once but twice yearly, to keep up with the abundance of good material submitted; and it is being made available in paperback as well as hardback, in response to demand from scholars wishing to purchase it. This volume, the first of 2000, features contributors from Britain, America, Europe, and Japan contributing pieces on Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Epicureanism, Pyrrhonism, and the recently discovered papyrus text of Empedocles.

Peter Abelard (1079-1142) was one of the most influential writers and thinkers of the twelfth century, famed for his skill in logic as well as his romance with Heloise. His Collationes - or Dialogue between a Christian, a Philosopher, and a Jew - is remarkable for the boldness of its conception and thought.

The ABC-CLIO World History Companion to Utopian Movements is a unique reference work devoted to actual and theoretical utopian movements. Detailed entries examine major utopian movements, significant utopian thinkers and literary works, and various sects, settlements, and communes. The more than 100 A to Z entries include: Diggers; Ecotopia; Fairhope Colony; Feminist Utopias; Futurism; Huguenot Utopias; Kibbutzim; Lunar Utopias; Millennialism; Native American Utopias; New Age Cults; Oneida Community; Ranters; Transcendentalism; and Welfare State.

This study concerns the position of Saint Thomas Aquinas on human self knowledge ("the soul's knowledge of itself," in medieval idiom). Its main goal is to present a comprehensive account of Aquinas's philosophy of self knowledge, by clarifying his texts on this topic and explaining why he made the claims he did. A second objective is to situate Thomas's position on self awareness within general world, and specific thirteenth century, traditions concerning this theme. And a third is to apply Aquinas's approach and insights to selected and contemporary issues that involve self knowledge, such as the alleged paradoxes of self reflection and of "unconscious awareness." The primary approach is that of "critical narrative," which attempts to understand St. Thomas's texts by posing critical questions for them. While this questioning may expose certain texts as equivocal or unsupported, usually Thomas emerges as coherent, reasonable, and better understood. This work is serious scholarship that presumes reader interest in philosophical reflection and some background in medieval type thinking. On the other hand, the book is not narrowly specialized in Aquinas or a single methodology, but includes broad reference to worldwide traditions and attempts to integrate St. Thomas's approach into topics of contemporary interest.

This book takes readers on a philosophical discovery of a forgotten treasure, one born in the 14th century but which appears to belong to the 21st. It presents a critical, up-to-date analysis of Santob de Carrion, also known as Sem Tob, a writer and thinker whose philosophy arose in the Spain of the three great cultures: Jews, Christians, and Muslims, who then coexisted in peace. The author first presents a historical and cultural introduction that provides biographical detail as well as context for a greater understand of Santob's philosophy. Next, the book offers a dialogue with the work itself, which looks at politics, sociology, anthropology, psychology, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and theodicy. The aim is not to provide an exhaustive analysis, or to comment on each and every verse, but rather to deal only with the most relevant for today's world. Readers will discover how Santob believed knowledge must be dynamic, and tolerance fundamental, fleeing from dogma, since one cannot avoid a significant dose of moral and aesthetic relativism. Subjectivity, within its own codes, must seek a profound ethics, not puritanical but which serves to escape from general ill will. Santob offers a criticism of wealth and power that does not serve the people which appears to be totally relevant today. In spite of the fame he achieved in his own time, Santob has largely remained a vestige of the past. By the end of this book, readers will come to see why this important figure deserves to be more widely studied. Indeed, not only has this medieval Spanish philosopher searched for truth in an unstable, confused world of contradictions, but he has done so in a way that can still help us today.

Martin Wight was perhaps the most profound thinker in international relations of his generation. In a discipline for too long mesmerized by the pseudo-science of the historically and philosophically illiterate, his work stands out like a beacon. Yet it is only in the decades since his death that his achievement has attained its true recognition.
Of the first volume of posthumously published lectures-- International Theory: The Three Traditions (1991)--one reviewer wrote: ' it] stands as a classic in the genre of printed lectures stretching from Aristotle to Ruskin... It is exhilarating... for there is nothing quite like it and-- which is a measure of Martin Wight's stature--there is not likely to be'.
That volume is here complemented and completed. In these four lectures Wight takes the archetypal thinkers of this three traditions--Machiavelli, Grotius, and Kant--to whom he adds Mazzini, the father of all revolutionary nationalism, and so the prototype of such as Nehru, Nasser, and Mandela, and subjects their writings and careers to a masterly analysis and commentary. The volume also contains an important new introduction to Wight's thought by Professor David S. Yost.

The concluding volume of Francis Oakley's authoritative trilogy moves on to engage the political thinkers of the later Middle Ages, Renaissance, Age of Reformation and religious wars, and the era that produced the Divine Right Theory of Kingship. Oakley's ground-breaking study probes the continuities and discontinuities between medieval and early modern modes of political thinking and dwells at length on the roots and nature of those contract theories that sought to legitimate political authority by grounding it in the consent of the governed.

Human, All Too Human is the first book by Friedrich Nietzsche to use the aphoristic style that would become emblematic of his most famous philosophy. This compact and inexpensive print edition ensures that you can absorb and appreciate these philosophical insights at little expense. His style, combining Nietzsche's vehement brand of argument with keynote nihilistic energy, is evident. Quickfire, furious nature of the points made in some respects foreshadow later works in which these qualities are enhanced still further. For the clinical yet perceptive style present in this early work, Nietzsche's adherents compare Human, All Too Human to the earliest works of psychology. Throughout the text, Nietzsche examines human traits and behaviours in a series of short passages, presenting a number of posits and philosophic arguments in each. The shortest of these are only a single paragraph, while the longest run for several.

Duns Scotus, along with Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham, was one of the three most talented and influential of the medieval schoolmen, and a highly original thinker. This book examines the central concepts in his physics, including matter, space, time, and unity.

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.

Gunon published his fundamental doctrinal work, Man and His Becoming according to the Vedanta, in 1925. After asserting that the Vedanta represents the purest metaphysics in Hindu doctrine, he acknowledges the impossibility of ever expounding it exhaustively and states that the specific object of his study will be the nature and constitution of the human being. Nonetheless, taking the human being as point of departure, he goes on to outline the fundamental principles of all traditional metaphysics. He leads the reader gradually to the doctrine of the Supreme Identity and its logical corollary-the possibility that the being in the human state might in this very life attain liberation, the unconditioned state where all separateness and risk of reversion to manifested existence ceases. Although Gunon chose the doctrine of the Advaita school (and in particular that of Shankara) as his basis, Man and His Becoming should not be considered exclusively an exposition of this school and of this master. It is, rather, a synthetic account drawing not only upon other orthodox branches of Hinduism, but not infrequently also upon the teachings of other traditional forms. Neither is it a work of erudition in the sense of the orientalists and historians of religion who study doctrines from the 'outside', but represents knowledge of the traditionally transmitted and effective 'sacred science'. Gunon treats other aspects of Hinduism in his Introduction to the Study of the Hindu Doctrines and Studies in Hinduism.

Taking Hugh of St. Victor's magisterial 'On the Sacraments of the Christian Faith' as his source text, Dillard applies the methods of analytic philosophy to develop a systematic theology in the spirit of Christian Platonism. The themes examined include the existence of God, creation ex nihilo, modality and causality, divine immutability and eternity, divine exemplarity, sin, dualism, personhood, evil, ecclesiology, and resurrection, and beatitude.