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Books > Humanities > Philosophy > Western philosophy > Western philosophy, c 500 to c 1600
Personal Autonomy and Social Oppression addresses the impact of
social conditions, especially subordinating conditions, on personal
autonomy. The essays in this volume are concerned with the
philosophical concept of autonomy or self-governance and with the
impact on relational autonomy of the oppressive circumstances
persons must navigate. They address on the one hand questions of
the theoretical structure of personal autonomy given various kinds
of social oppression, and on the other, how contexts of social
oppression make autonomy difficult or impossible.
An illuminating introduction to the elusive Thomas Aquinas-the man
and the saint "A marvellous introduction to the thought of the most
daring and most important thinker of the Christian Middle Ages. . .
. The best single-volume introduction to St. Thomas."-Eamon Duffy,
The Tablet "Rich, provocative and sophisticated, a work of both
passion and serious scholarship. It is a triumph."-Jonathan Wright,
Catholic Herald Leaving so few traces of himself behind, Thomas
Aquinas seems to defy the efforts of the biographer. Highly visible
as a public teacher, preacher, and theologian, he nevertheless has
remained nearly invisible as man and saint. What can be discovered
about Thomas Aquinas as a whole? In this short, compelling
portrait, Denys Turner clears away the haze of time and brings
Thomas vividly to life for contemporary readers-those unfamiliar
with the saint as well as those well acquainted with his teachings.
Building on the best biographical scholarship available today and
reading the works of Thomas with piercing acuity, Turner seeks the
point at which the man, the mind, and the soul of Thomas Aquinas
intersect. Reflecting upon Thomas, a man of Christian Trinitarian
faith yet one whose thought is grounded firmly in the body's
interaction with the material world, a thinker at once confident in
the powers of human reason and a man of prayer, Turner provides a
more detailed human portrait than ever before of one of the most
influential philosophers and theologians in all of Western thought.
Scholars have often been quick to acknowledge Thomas Aquinas's
distinctive retrieval of Aristotle's Greek philosophical heritage.
Often lagging, however, has been a proper appreciation of both his
originality and indebtedness in appropriating the great theological
insights of the Greek Fathers of the Church. In a similar way to
his integration of the Aristotelian philosophical corpus, Aquinas
successfully interwove the often newly received and translated
Greek patristic sources into a thirteenth-century theological
framework, one dominated by the Latin Fathers. His use of the Greek
Fathers definitively shaped his exposition of sacra doctrina in the
fundamental areas of God and creation, Trinitarian theology, the
moral life, and Christ and the Sacraments. For the sake of filling
this lacuna and of piquing scholarly interest in Aquinas's relation
to the Fathers of the Christian East, the Aquinas Center for
Theological Renewal at Ave Maria University and the Thomistic
Institute of the Pontifical Faculty of the Immaculate Conception at
the Dominican House of Studies co-sponsored an international
gathering of scholars that took place at Ave Maria University under
the title Thomas Aquinas and the Greek Fathers. Sensitive to the
commonalities and the differences between Aquinas and the Greek
Fathers, the essays in this volume have sprung from the theme of
this conference and offer a harvest of some of the conference's
fruits. At long last, scholars have a rich volume of diverse,
penetrating essays that both underscore Aquinas's unique standing
among the Latin scholastics in relationship to the Greek Fathers
and point the way toward avenues of further study.
TABLE OF CONTENTS: Translator's Introduction Introduction by
Genevieve Rodis-Lewis The Passions of the Sou l: Preface PART I:
About the Passions in General, and Incidentally about the Entire
Nature of Man PART II: About the Number and Order of the Passions,
and the Explanation of the Six Primitives PART III: About the
Particular Passions Lexicon: Index to Lexicon Bibliography Index
Index Locorum
It is commonly supposed that certain elements of medieval
philosophy are uncharacteristically preserved in modern
philosophical thought through the idea that mental phenomena are
distinguished from physical phenomena by their intentionality,
their intrinsic directedness toward some object. The many
exceptions to this presumption, however, threaten its viability.
This volume explores the intricacies and varieties of the
conceptual relationships medieval thinkers developed among
intentionality, cognition, and mental representation. Ranging from
Aquinas, Scotus, Ockham, and Buridan through less-familiar writers,
the collection sheds new light on the various strands that run
between medieval and modern thought and bring us to a number of
fundamental questions in the philosophy of mind as it is conceived
today.
The letters of Heloise and Abelard will remain one of the great,
romantic and intellectual documents of human civilization while
they, themselves, are probably second only to Romeo and Juliet in
the fame accrued by tragic lovers. Here for the first time in Mart
Martin McLaughlin's edition is the complete correspendence with
commentary.
Over the last two decades there has been an increasing interest in
the influence of medieval Jewish thought upon Spinoza's philosophy.
The essays in this volume, by Spinoza specialists and leading
scholars in the field of medieval Jewish philosophy, consider the
various dimensions of the rich, important, but vastly under-studied
relationship between Spinoza and earlier Jewish thinkers. It is the
first such collection in any language, and together the essays
provide a detailed and extensive analysis of how different elements
in Spinoza's metaphysics, epistemology, moral philosophy, and
political and religious thought relate to the views of his Jewish
philosophical forebears, such as Maimonides, Gersonides, Ibn Ezra,
Crescas, and others. The topics addressed include the immortality
of the soul, the nature of God, the intellectual love of God, moral
luck, the nature of happiness, determinism and free will, the
interpretation of Scripture, and the politics of religion.
This is an exploration and analysis of Aquinas's contribution to
the philosophy of religion. It examines Aquinas's contexts, his
views on philosophy and theology, as well as faith and reason. His
arguments for God's existence, responses to objections against
God's existence and his characterization of the nature of God are
examined.
Though the subject of this work, "nominalism and contemporary nom
inalism," is philosophical, it cannot be fully treated without
relating it to data gathered from a great variety of domains, such
as biology and more especially ethology, psychology, linguistics
and neurobiology. The source of inspiration has been an academic
work I wrote in order to obtain a postdoctoral degree, which is
called in Belgium an "Aggregaat voor het Hoger Onderwijs"
comparable to a "Habilitation" in Germany. I want to thank the
National Fund of Scientific Research, which accorded me several
grants and thereby enabled me to write the academic work in the
first place and thereafter this book. I also want to thank Prof.
SJ. Doorman (Technical University of Delft) and Prof. G. Nuchelmans
(University of Leiden), who were members of the jury of the "Aggre
gaatsthesis," presented to the Free University of Brussels in 1981
and who by their criticisms and suggestions encouraged me to write
the present book, the core of which is constituted by the general
ideas then formulated. I am further obliged to Mr. X, the referee
who was asked by Jaakko Hintikka to read my work and who made a
series of constructive remarks and recom mendations. My colleague
Marc De Mey (University of Ghent) helped me greatly with the more
formal aspects of my work and spent too much of his valuable time
and energy to enable me to deliver a presentable copy. All
remaining shortcomings are entirely my responsibility. I asked
Prof."
In this collection of articles, Kari Elisabeth Borresen and Kari
Vogt point out the convergence of androcentric gender models in the
Christian and Islamic traditions. They provide extensive surveys of
recent research in women's studies, with bio-socio-cultural
genderedness as their main analytical category. Matristic writers
from late Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance are
analysed in terms of a female God language, reshaping traditional
theology. The persisting androcentrism of 20th-century Christianity
and Islam, as displayed in institutional documents promoting
women's specific functions, is critically exposed. This volume
presents a pioneering investigation of correlated Christian and
Islamic gender models which has hitherto remained uncompared by
women's studies in religion. This work will serve scholars and
students in the humanistic disciplines of theology, religious
studies, Islamic studies, history of ideas, Medieval philosophy and
women's history. "
Finocchiaro's new and revised translations have done what the
Inquisition could not: they have captured an exceptional range of
Galileo's career while also letting him speak--in clear English. No
other volume offers more convenient or more reliable access to
Galileo's own words, whether on the telescope, the Dialogue, the
trial, or the mature theory of motion. --Michael H. Shank,
Professor of the History of Science, University of
Wisconsin--Madison
This book locates Christine de Pizan's argument that women are
virtuous members of the political community within the context of
earlier discussions of the relative virtues of men and women. It is
the first to explore how women were represented and addressed
within medieval discussions of the virtues. It introduces readers
to the little studied "Speculum Dominarum" (Mirror of Ladies), a
mirror for a princess, compiled for Jeanne of Navarre, which
circulated in the courtly milieu that nurtured Christine.Throwing
new light on the way in which Medieval women understood the
virtues, and were represented by others as virtuous subjects,
itpositions the ethical ideas of Anne of France, Laura Cereta,
Marguerite of Navarre and the Dames de la Roche within an evolving
discourse on the virtues that is marked by the transition from
Medieval to Renaissance thought.
"Virtue Ethics for Women 1250-1500" will be of interest to those
studying virtue ethics, the history of women's ideas and Medieval
and Renaissance thought in general."
Self-knowledge is commonly thought to have become a topic of
serious philosophical inquiry during the early modern period.
Already in the thirteenth century, however, the medieval thinker
Thomas Aquinas developed a sophisticated theory of self-knowledge,
which Therese Scarpelli Cory presents as a project of reconciling
the conflicting phenomena of self-opacity and privileged
self-access. Situating Aquinas's theory within the
mid-thirteenth-century debate and his own maturing thought on human
nature, Cory investigates the kinds of self-knowledge that Aquinas
describes and the questions they raise. She shows that to a degree
remarkable in a medieval thinker, self-knowledge turns out to be
central to Aquinas's account of cognition and personhood, and that
his theory provides tools for considering intentionality,
reflexivity and selfhood. Her engaging account of this neglected
aspect of medieval philosophy will interest readers studying
Aquinas and the history of medieval philosophy more generally.
In the year 1985, presumed to mark the 850th anniversary of
Maimonides' birth, the Sixth Jerusalem Philosophical Encounter was
dedicated to Maim onides as philosopher. We did not enter into the
other aspects of his work, rabbinical, legal, medical, etc., except
in so far as the relation between his philosophy and his work in
halakha (Jewish law) is itself a philosophical question. That no
one is quite certain about Maimonides' date of birth is symbolic of
the state of his philosophy as well. Maimonides' thought poses
various enigmas, lends itself to contradictory interpretations and
gives rise today, as it did in the Middle Ages, to sustained
controversies. Some of the contribu tions to the present volume
deal with these and cognate topics. Others deal with certain
aspects of the philosophical tradition in which Maimonides was
rooted, with some traits peculiar to the Islamic society in the
midst of which he lived, and with his influence on Christian
scholasticism. Maimonides' thought had many facets, and for this
and other reasons the question as to his place and stature in the
history of philosophy admits of no simple answer. In this volume an
attempt has been made to draw atten tion to some of these
complexities."
The first Symposium consisted of three people in a cafe in Warsaw
in 1973. Since then, meetings have grown in size and have been held
in Leyden, Copenhagen, Nijmegen, Rome, Oxford, Poitiers and
Freiburg am-Breisgau. The ninth Symposium was held in St Andrews in
June 1990, with 57 participants who listened to addresses by 28
speakers. It was very fitting that Scotland's oldest university,
founded in the heyday of medievalleaming in 1411, should have been
given the chance to bring together scholars from all over Europe
and beyond to present their researches on the glorious past of
scholastic rational thought. The topic of the Symposium was
"Sophisms in Medieval Logic and Grammar". The present volume
consists, for the most part, of the papers presented at the
Symposium. In fact, however, it proved impossible to include five
of the contributions. Two of the papers included here were intended
for the Symposium but in the event not delivered, because of the
unavoidable absence of the speakers. The Symposium received very
helpful financial support from one of the major philosophical
associations in Britain, the Mind Association, from the
Philosophical Quarterly, a journal published at St Andrews, from
the University of St Andrews, from the British Academy, and from
Low and Bonarplc. In organising the programme for the conference
and in preparing the papers for publication I received invaluable
help from: Professor E.J.
Treatise on Divine Predestination is one of the early writings of
the author of the great philosophical work Periphyseon (On the
Division of Nature), Johannes Scottus (the Irishman), known as
Eriugena (died c. 877 A.D.). It contributes to the age-old debate
on the question of human destiny in the present world and in the
afterlife.
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.
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