In this classic work, Frederick C. Copleston, S.J., outlines the development of philosophical reflection in Christian, Islamic, and Jewish thought from the ancient world to the late medieval period. A History of Medieval Philosophy is an invaluable general introduction that also includes longer treatments of such leading thinkers as Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham.

This book is an inquiry into the mystical thought of Gregory Barhebraeus (1226-1286CE) and its contemporary relevance, to offer a reading of Barhebraeus' mystical texts by bringing them into conversation with critical religious studies and the hermeneutical tradition of philosophy. The methodological focus of my thesis has led me to pay particular attention to the language used for the study of mysticism, and I lay emphasis on finding a new language that avoids the phenomenological assumptions concerning 'mysticism' to attend to the particularity of 'mystic' traditions, such as that of the Syriac mystic tradition inherited by Barhebraeus.

This book provides an ethical framework for understanding the good and how we can experience it in increasing measure. In Part 1, Kevin Kinghorn offers a formal analysis of the meaning of the term "good," the nature of goodness, and why we are motivated to pursue it. Setting this analysis within a larger ethical framework, Kinghorn proposes a way of understanding where noninstrumental value lies, the source of normativity, and the relationship between the good and the right. Kinghorn defends a welfarist conception of the good along with the view that mental states alone directly affect a person's well-being. He endorses a Humean account of motivation-in which desires alone motivate us, not moral beliefs-to explain the source of the normative pressure we feel to do the good and the right. Turning to the place of objectivity within ethics, he concludes that the concept of "objective wrongness" is a misguided one, although a robust account of "objective goodness" is still possible. In Part 2, Kinghorn shifts to a substantive, Christian account of what the good life consists in as well as how we can achieve it. Hume's emphasis of desire over reason is not challenged but rather endorsed as a way of understanding both the human capacity for choice and the means by which God prompts us to pursue relationships of benevolence, in which our ultimate flourishing consists.

Throughout history, humans have dreamed of knowing the reason for the existence of the universe. In The Mind of God, physicist Paul Davies explores whether modern science can provide the key that will unlock this last secret. In his quest for an ultimate explanation, Davies reexamines the great questions that have preoccupied humankind for millennia, and in the process explores, among other topics, the origin and evolution of the cosmos, the nature of life and consciousness, and the claim that our universe is a kind of gigantic computer. Charting the ways in which the theories of such scientists as Newton, Einstein, and more recently Stephen Hawking and Richard Feynman have altered our conception of the physical universe. Davies puts these scientists' discoveries into context with the writings of philosophers such as Plato. Descartes, Hume, and Kant. His startling conclusion is that the universe is "no minor byproduct of mindless, purposeless forces. We are truly meant to be here." By the means of science, we can truly see into the mind of God.