Robert Pasnau traces the developments of metaphysical thinking through four rich but for the most part neglected centuries of philosophy, running from the thirteenth century through to the seventeenth. At no period in the history of philosophy, other than perhaps our own, have metaphysical problems received the sort of sustained attention they received during the later Middle Ages, and never has a whole philosophical tradition come crashing down as quickly and completely as did scholastic philosophy in the seventeenth century. The thirty chapters work through various fundamental metaphysical issues, sometimes focusing more on scholastic thought, sometimes on the seventeenth century. Pasnau begins with the first challenges to the classical scholasticism of Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas, runs through prominent figures like John Duns Scotus and William Ockham, and ends in the seventeenth century, with the end of the first stage of developments in post-scholastic philosophy: on the continent, with Descartes and Gassendi, and in England, with Boyle and Locke.

The importance of Bessarion's contribution to the history of Byzantine and Renaissance philosophy and culture during the 15th century is beyond dispute. However, an adequate appreciation of his contribution still remains a desideratum of scholarly research. One serious impediment to scholarly progress is the fact that the critical edition of his main philosophical work "In Calumniatorem Platonis" is incomplete and that this work has not been translated in its entirety into any modern language yet. Same can be stated about several minor but equally important treatises on literary, theological and philosophical subjects. This makes editing, translating and interpreting his literary, religious and philosophical works a scholarly priority. Papers assembled in this volume highlight a number of philological, philosophical and historical aspects that are crucial to our understanding of Bessarion's role in the history of European civilization and to setting the directions of future research in this field.

This book is an introduction to trinitarian theology as it developed from the late medieval period. John T. Slotemaker presents an overview of the central aspects of trinitarian theology by focusing on four themes: theological epistemology, the emanations in God, the divine relations, and the Trinity of persons. He does so by exploring a broad range of theological opinions on each subject and delineating the options that existed for medieval theologians from the early thirteenth century through the sixteenth. He argues that despite the diversity of opinion on a given subject, there is a normative theological center that grounds late medieval trinitarian theology. This center consists of theological developments involving the adoption of Peter Lombard's Sentences as a theological textbook, the conciliar decisions of Lateran IV, and a shared Aristotelian philosophical background of Western trinitarian theology.

Fifty-one years after the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche died, My Sister and I appeared on the American market as a book that was reputedly written by him when he was an inmate in the Jena insane asylum. Since the day it appeared, the book's authenticity has been generally dismissed as a fraud.Walter Stewart takes a fresh look at this book in what is the first detailed account of the myth, legend, and scholarly criticism that has shrouded this work in mystery for over half a century and for the first time unveils the real truth about My Sister and I.

Weakness of will, the phenomenon of acting contrary to one's own better judgment, has remained a prominent discussion topic of philosophy. The history of this discussion in ancient, medieval, and modern times has been outlined in many studies. Weakness of Will in Renaissance and ReformationThought is, however, the first book to cover the fascinating source materials on weakness of will between 1350 and 1650. In addition to considering the work of a broad range of Renaissance authors (including Petrarch, Donato Acciaiuoli, John Mair, and Francesco Piccolomini), Risto Saarinen explores the theologically coloured debates of the Reformation period, such as those provided by Martin Luther, Philip Melanchthon, John Calvin, and Lambert Daneau. He goes on to discuss the impact of these authors on prominent figures of early modernity, including Shakespeare, Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.
While most of the historical research on weakness of will has focused on the reception history of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, Saarinen pays attention to the Platonic and Stoic discussions and their revival during the Renaissance and the Reformation. He also shows the ways in which Augustine's discussion of the divided will is intertwined with the Christian reception of ancient Greek ethics, and argues that the theological underpinnings of early modern authors do not rule out weakness of will, but transform the philosophical discussion and lead it towards new solutions.

This monograph proposes a new (dialogical) way of studying the different forms of correlational inference, known in the Islamic jurisprudence as qiyas. According to the authors' view, qiyas represents an innovative and sophisticated form of dialectical reasoning that not only provides new epistemological insights into legal argumentation in general (including legal reasoning in Common and Civil Law) but also furnishes a fine-grained pattern for parallel reasoning which can be deployed in a wide range of problem-solving contexts and does not seem to reduce to the standard forms of analogical reasoning studied in contemporary philosophy of science and argumentation theory. After an overview of the emergence of qiyas and of the work of al-Shirazi penned by Soufi Youcef, the authors discuss al-Shirazi's classification of correlational inferences of the occasioning factor (qiyas al-'illa). The second part of the volume deliberates on the system of correlational inferences by indication and resemblance (qiyas al-dalala, qiyas al-shabah). The third part develops the main theoretical background of the authors' work, namely, the dialogical approach to Martin-Loef's Constructive Type Theory. The authors present this in a general form and independently of adaptations deployed in parts I and II. Part III also includes an appendix on the relevant notions of Constructive Type Theory, which has been extracted from an overview written by Ansten Klev. The book concludes with some brief remarks on contemporary approaches to analogy in Common and Civil Law and also to parallel reasoning in general.

From Empedocles to Wittgenstein is a collection of fifteen historical essays in philosophy, written by Sir Anthony Kenny in the early years of the 21st century. In the main they are concerned with four of the great philosophers whom he most esteems, namely Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, and Wittgenstein. The author is not only one of the most respected historians of philosophy, and possibly the widest-ranging, but also one of the most successful at writing on the subject for a broad readership. In this volume he presents scholarly explorations of some themes which caught his interest as he worked on his acclaimed four-volume New History of Western Philosophy.

Reading Illegitimacy in Early Iberian Literature presents illegitimacy as a fluid, creative, and negotiable concept in early literature which challenges society's definition of what is acceptable. Through the medieval epic poems Cantar de Mio Cid and Mocedades de Rodrigo, the ballad tradition, Cervantes's Novelas ejemplares, and Lope de Vega's theatre, Geraldine Hazbun demonstrates that illegitimacy and legitimacy are interconnected and flexible categories defined in relation to marriage, sex, bodies, ethnicity, religion, lineage, and legacy. Both categories are subject to the uncertainties and freedoms of language and fiction and frequently constructed around axes of quantity and completeness. These literary texts, covering a range of illegitimate figures, some with an historical basis, demonstrate that truth, propriety, and standards of behaviour are not forged in the law code or the pulpit but in literature's fluid system of producing meaning.

Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is the text which had the single greatest influence on Aquinas's ethical writings, and the historical and philosophical value of Aquinas's appropriation of this text provokes lively debate. In this volume of new essays, thirteen distinguished scholars explore how Aquinas receives, expands on, and transforms Aristotle's insights about the attainability of happiness, the scope of moral virtue, the foundation of morality, and the nature of pleasure. They examine Aquinas's commentary on the Ethics and his theological writings, above all the Summa theologiae. Their essays show Aquinas to be a highly perceptive interpreter, but one who also who also brings certain presuppositions to the Ethics and alters key Aristotelian notions for his own purposes. The result is a rich and nuanced picture of Aquinas's relation to Aristotle that will be of interest to readers in moral philosophy, Aquinas studies, the history of theology, and the history of philosophy.

The instant Sunday Times bestseller A Times, New Statesman and Spectator Book of the Year 'Simply the best popular history of the Middle Ages there is' Sunday Times 'A great achievement, pulling together many strands with aplomb' Peter Frankopan, Spectator, Books of the Year 'It's so delightful to encounter a skilled historian of such enormous energy who's never afraid of being entertaining' The Times, Books of the Year 'An amazing masterly gripping panorama' Simon Sebag Montefiore 'A badass history writer... to put it mildly' Duff McKagan 'A triumph' Charles Spencer Dan Jones's epic new history tells nothing less than the story of how the world we know today came to be built. It is a thousand-year adventure that moves from the ruins of the once-mighty city of Rome, sacked by barbarians in AD 410, to the first contacts between the old and new worlds in the sixteenth century. It shows how, from a state of crisis and collapse, the West was rebuilt and came to dominate the entire globe. The book identifies three key themes that underpinned the success of the West: commerce, conquest and Christianity. Across 16 chapters, blending Dan Jones's trademark gripping narrative style with authoritative analysis, Powers and Thrones shows how, at each stage in this story, successive western powers thrived by attracting - or stealing - the most valuable resources, ideas and people from the rest of the world. It casts new light on iconic locations - Rome, Paris, Venice, Constantinople - and it features some of history's most famous and notorious men and women. This is a book written about - and for - an age of profound change, and it asks the biggest questions about the West both then and now. Where did we come from? What made us? Where do we go from here? Also available in audio, read by the author.

"In this massive, meticulously researched work Trinkaus makes a major contribution to our understanding of the Italian humanists and the Christian Renaissance in Italy. . . . The author argues persuasively that the Italian humanists drew their inspiration more from the church fathers than from the pagan ancients. . . . [This is] the most comprehensive and most important study of Italian humanism to appear in English. It is a mine of information, offering, among other things, detailed analyses of texts which have been ignored even by Italian scholars." -Library Journal

By exploring the philosophical character of some of the greatest medieval thinkers, An Introduction to Medieval Philosophy provides a rich overview of philosophy in the world of Latin Christianity. Explores the deeply philosophical character of such medieval thinkers as Augustine, Boethius, Eriugena, Anselm, Aquinas, Bonaventure, Scotus, and Ockham Reviews the central features of the epistemological and metaphysical problem of universals Shows how medieval authors adapted philosophical ideas from antiquity to apply to their religious commitments Takes a broad philosophical approach of the medieval era by,taking account of classical metaphysics, general culture, and religious themes

Ruth Glasner presents an illuminating reappraisal of Averroes' physics. Glasner is the first scholar to base her interpretation on the full range of Averroes' writings, including texts that are extant only in Hebrew manuscripts and have not been hitherto studied. She reveals that Averroes changed his interpretation of the basic notions of physics - the structure of corporeal reality and the definition of motion - more than once. After many hesitations he offers a bold new interpretation of physics which Glasner calls 'Aristotelian atomism'. Ideas that are usually ascribed to scholastic scholars, and others that were traced back to Averroes but only in a very general form, are shown not only to have originated with him, but to have been fully developed by him into a comprehensive and systematic physical system. Unlike earlier Greek or Muslim atomistic systems, Averroes' Aristotelian atomism endeavours to be fully scientific, by Aristotelian standards, and still to provide a basis for an indeterministic natural philosophy. Commonly known as 'the commentator' and usually considered to be a faithful follower of Aristotle, Averroes is revealed in his commentaries on the Physics to be an original and sophisticated philosopher.

Beatific Enjoyment in Medieval Scholastic Debates examines the religious concept of enjoyment as discussed by scholastic theologians in the Latin Middle Ages. Severin Kitanov argues that central to the concept of beatific enjoyment (fruitio beatifica) is the distinction between the terms enjoyment and use (frui et uti) found in Saint Augustine's treatise On Christian Learning. Peter Lombard, a twelfth-century Italian theologian, chose the enjoyment of God to serve as an opening topic of his Sentences and thereby set in motion an enduring scholastic discourse. Kitanov examines the nature of volition and the relationship between volition and cognition. He also explores theological debates on the definition of enjoyment: whether there are different kinds and degrees of enjoyment, whether natural reason unassisted by divine revelation can demonstrate that beatific enjoyment is possible, whether beatific enjoyment is the same as pleasure, whether it has an intrinsic cognitive character, and whether the enjoyment of God in heaven is a free or un-free act. Even though the concept of beatific enjoyment is essentially religious and theological, medieval scholastic authors discussed this concept by means of Aristotle's logical and scientific apparatus and through the lens of metaphysics, physics, psychology, and virtue ethics. Bringing together Christian theological and Aristotelian scientific and philosophical approaches to enjoyment, Kitanov exposes the intricacy of the discourse and makes it intelligible for both students and scholars.

Elijah Del Medigo (1458-1493) was a Jewish Aristotelian philosopher living in Padua, whose work influenced many of the leading philosophers of the early Renaissance. His Two Investigations on the Nature of the Human Soul uses Aristotle's De anima to theorize on two of the most discussed and most controversial philosophical debates of the Renaissance: the nature of human intellect and the obtaining of immortality through intellectual perfection. In this book, Michael Engel places Del Medigo's philosophical work and his ideas about the human intellect within the context of the wider Aristotelian tradition. Providing a detailed account of the unique blend of Hebrew, Islamic, Latin and Greek traditions that influenced the Two Investigations, Elijah Del Medigo and Paduan Aristotelianism provides an important contribution to our understanding of Renaissance Aristotelianisms and scholasticisms. In particular, through his defense of the Muslim philosopher Averroes' hotly debated interpretation of the De anima and his rejection of the moderate Latin Aristotelianism championed by the Christian Thomas Aquinas, Engel traces how Del Medigo's work on the human intellect contributed to the development of a major Aristotelian controversy. Investigating the ways in which multicultural Aristotelian sources contributed to his own theory of a united human intellect, Elijah Del Medigo and Paduan Aristotelianism demonstrates the significant impact made by this Jewish philosopher on the history of the Aristotelian tradition.

During the seventeenth century Francisco Suarez was considered one of the greatest philosophers of the age. He was the last great Scholastic thinker and profoundly influenced the thought of his contemporaries within both Catholic and Protestant circles. Suarez contributed to all fields of philosophy, from natural law, ethics, and political theory to natural philosophy, the philosophy of mind, and philosophical psychology, and-most importantly-to metaphysics, and natural theology. Echoes of his thinking reverberate through the philosophy of Descartes, Locke, Leibniz, and beyond. Yet curiously Suarez has not been studied in detail by historians of philosophy. It is only recently that he has emerged as a significant subject of critical and historical investigation for historians of late medieval and early modern philosophy. Only in recent years have small sections of Suarez's magnum opus, the Metaphysical Disputations, been translated into English, French, and Italian. The historical task of interpreting Suarez's thought is still in its infancy. The Philosophy of Francisco Suarez is one of the first collections in English written by the leading scholars who are largely responsible for this new trend in the history of philosophy. It covers all areas of Suarez's philosophical contributions, and contains cutting-edge research which will shape and frame scholarship on Suarez for years to come-as well as the history of seventeenth-century generally. This is an essential text for anyone interested in Suarez, the seventeenth-century world of ideas, and late Scholastic or early modern philosophy.