Born near Einsiedeln in 1493, Philip Theophrastus von Hohenheim, who later called himself Paracelsus, was the son of a physician. His thirst for knowledge led him to study arts in Vienna, then medicine in Italy, but the instruction left him disillusioned. He had learned to see nature with his own eyes, undiluted by the teachings of books. He was a rebellious spirit, hard-headed and stubborn, who travelled all over Europe and the British Isles to practice medicine, study local diseases, and learn from any source he could, humble as it might be. In these years of wanderings, Paracelsus developed his own system of medicine and a philosophy of theology all his own. Though he wrote a great many books that covered a wide range of subjects, only a few of his works were ever published in his lifetime. When he died in Salzburg in 1541, one of the most forceful personalities of the Renaissance died with him.

Here are collected four treatises which illustrate four different aspects of Paracelsus' work. The first gives a passionate justification of his character, activities, and views, and gives a picture of the man and his basic ideas. The second treatise is a study of the diseases of miners, with whom Paracelsus had spent a great deal of time. Then follows a treatise on the psychology and psychiatry of Paracelsus. Written at a time when mental diseases were beginning to be studied and treated by physicians, this pioneering essay anticipates a number of modern views. The last essay, entitled "A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits," is a fanciful and poetic treatment of paganism and Greek mythology, as well as a good sample of Paracelsus' philosophy and theology. Together these essays show one of the most original minds of the Renaissance at the height of his powers.

The gradual secularization of European society and culture is often said to characterize the development of the modern world, and the early Italian humanists played a pioneering role in this process. Here Benjamin G. Kohl and Ronald G. Witt, with Elizabeth B. Welles, have edited and translated seven primary texts that shed important light on the subject of "civic humanism" in the Renaissance.Included is a treatise of Francesco Petrarca on government, two representative letters from Coluccio Salutati, Leonardo Bruni's panegyric to Florence, Francesco Barbaro's letter on "wifely" duty, Poggio Bracciolini's dialogue on avarice, and Angelo Poliziano's vivid history of the Pazzi conspiracy. Each translation is prefaced by an essay on the author and a short bibliography. The substantial introductory essay offers a concise, balanced summary of the historiographcal issues connected with the period.

Giovanni Pontano, who adopted the academic sobriquet "Gioviano," was prime minister to several kings of Naples and the most important Neapolitan humanist of the quattrocento. Best known today as a Latin poet, he also composed dialogues depicting the intellectual life of the humanist academy of which he was the head, and, late in life, a number of moral essays that became his most popular prose works. The De sermone (On Speech), translated into English here for the first time, aims to provide a moral anatomy, following Aristotelian principles, of various aspects of speech such as truthfulness and deception, flattery, gossip, loquacity, calumny, mercantile bargaining, irony, wit, and ridicule. In each type of speech, Pontano tries to identify what should count as the virtuous mean, that which identifies the speaker as a person of education, taste, and moral probity.

Moses Maimonides (1138-1204) was arguably the single most important Jewish thinker of the Middle Ages, with an impact on the later Jewish tradition that was unparalleled by any of his contemporaries. In this volume of new essays, world-leading scholars address themes relevant to his philosophical outlook, including his relationship with his Islamicate surroundings and the impact of his work on subsequent Jewish and Christian writings, as well as his reception in twentieth-century scholarship. The essays also address the nature and aim of Maimonides' philosophical writing, including its connection with biblical exegesis, and the philosophical and theological arguments that are central to his work, such as revelation, ritual, divine providence, and teleology. Wide-ranging and fully up-to-date, the volume will be highly valuable for those interested in Jewish history and thought, medieval philosophy, and religious studies.

Exploring what theologians at the University of Paris in the thirteenth century understood about the boundary between humans and animals, this book demonstrates the great variety of ways in which they held similarity and difference in productive tension. Analysing key theological works, Ian P. Wei presents extended close readings of William of Auvergne, the Summa Halensis, Bonaventure, Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas. These scholars found it useful to consider animals and humans together, especially with regard to animal knowledge and behaviour, when discussing issues including creation, the fall, divine providence, the heavens, angels and demons, virtues and passions. While they frequently stressed that animals had been created for use by humans, and sometimes treated them as tools employed by God to shape human behaviour, animals were also analytical tools for the theologians themselves. This study thus reveals how animals became a crucial resource for generating knowledge of God and the whole of creation.

Die Studie, im Sinne der Intellectual History angelegt, rekonstruiert und dokumentiert den originaren wie konzeptionellen Beitrag Leo Loewenthals zur fruhen Kritischen Theorie, wie sie in den 1930er Jahren von den engsten Mitarbeitern des Instituts fur Sozialforschung - Max Horkheimer, Theodor W. Adorno, Herbert Marcuse, Erich Fromm, Friedrich Pollock und Walter Benjamin - entwickelt und in der Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung publiziert wurde. Als verantwortlicher Schriftleiter der Zeitschrift sicherte Loewenthal dem hier gebotenen Forum fur kritische Sozialforschung den Fortbestand auch in politisch schwierigen Zeiten. Diese besondere Rolle Loewenthals schmalert nicht die Bedeutung seiner theoretischen Beitrage zur Zeitschrift fur Sozialforschung, stehen sie doch in enger inhaltlicher Beziehung zu den Arbeiten der anderen Institutsmitglieder und waren wie diese fur die Entwicklung der Kritischen Theorie unentbehrlich.

Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) was the leading Platonic philosopher of the Renaissance and is generally recognized as the greatest authority on ancient Platonism before modern times. Among his finest accomplishments as a scholar was his 1492 Latin translation of the complete works of Plotinus (204-270 CE), the founder of Neoplatonism. The 1492 edition also contained an immense commentary that remained for centuries the principle introduction to Plotinus's works for Western scholars. At the same time, it constitutes a major statement of Ficino's own late metaphysics. The I Tatti edition, planned in six volumes, contains the first modern edition of the Latin text and the first translation into any modern language. The present volume also includes a substantial analytical study of Ficino's interpretation of Plotinus' Fourth Ennead.

Kants kritischer Philosophie wird bis heute von prominenter Seite der Vorwurf gemacht, sie unterstelle ein im Kern subjektivistisch-monologisches Individuum. Tatsachlich aber liegt ihr nichts ferner als ein solcher Subjektivismus. Kants Vernunft ist eine durch und durch oeffentliche Vernunft, sie ist, wie er selbst sagt, existenziell angewiesen auf oeffentliches Rasonnement. Kant verwendet den Begriff "OEffentlichkeit", anders als das Adjektiv "oeffentlich", in seinem schriftlichen Werk zwar kein einziges Mal, die Funktion der OEffentlichkeit aber sieht er als fur sein Denken elementar an. Entscheidend dabei: OEffentlichkeit ist nicht nur eine Bedingung allen kritischen Vernunftgebrauchs, sondern gerade auch dessen Folge. Trager der Vernunft sind freie, empirische Individuen. Machen diese Individuen Gebrauch von ihrer oeffentlichen Vernunft, konstituieren sie bestimmte OEffentlichkeiten des Vernunftgebrauchs - namlich neben der politischen, die theoretische, die praktische und die asthetische OEffentlichkeit. Die vorliegende Arbeit geht dieser OEffentlichkeit der Vernunft unter anderem in den drei Kritiken nach - und zeigt dabei, wie eng insbesondere Kants theoretische Philosophie mit seinen politischen Schriften verbunden ist.

The third volume of The Hackett Aquinas, a series of central philosophical treatises of Aquinas in new, state-of-the-art translations accompanied by a thorough commentary on the text.

Italian Renaissance thought has been gaining ever-increasing recognition as seminal to the thought of the whole Renaissance period, affecting in many subtle ways the development and understanding of artistic, literary, scientific, and religious movements. The importance, then, of this detailed and careful survey of Italy's leading Renaissance philosophers and the intricate philosophical problems of the time can scarcely be exaggerated. Based upon the 1961 Arensberg Lectures, given at Stanford University, this collection of essays offers a genuinely unified interpretation of Italian Renaissance thought by describing and evaluating the philosophies of eight pivotal figures: Petrarch, Valla, Ficino, Pico, Pomponazzi, Telesio, Patrizi, and Bruno. The essays not only discuss the life, writings, and main ideas of these eight thinkers, but also establish through a connective text, the place each of them occupies in the general intellectual development of the Italian Renaissance.

In Utopia, Thomas More gives us a traveller's account of a newly discovered island where the inhabitants enjoy a social order based on natural reason and justice, and human fulfilment is open to all. As the traveller, Raphael, describes the island to More, a bitter contrast is drawn between this rational society and the custom-driven practices of Europe. So how can the philosopher try to reform his society? In his fictional discussion, More takes up a question first raised by Plato and which is still a challenge in the contemporary world. In the history of political thought few works have been more influential than Utopia, and few more misunderstood.

More than any other early modern text, Montaigne's Essais have come to be associated with the emergence of a distinctively modern subjectivity, defined in opposition to the artifices of language and social performance. Felicity Green challenges this interpretation with a compelling revisionist reading of Montaigne's text, centred on one of his deepest but hitherto most neglected preoccupations: the need to secure for himself a sphere of liberty and independence that he can properly call his own, or himself. Montaigne and the Life of Freedom restores the Essais to its historical context by examining the sources, character and significance of Montaigne's project of self-study. That project, as Green shows, reactivates and reshapes ancient practices of self-awareness and self-regulation, in order to establish the self as a space of inner refuge, tranquillity and dominion, free from the inward compulsion of the passions and from subjection to external objects, forces and persons.

What is 'truth'? The question that Pilate put to Jesus was laced with dramatic irony. But at a time when what is true and what is untrue have acquired a new currency, the question remains of crucial significance. Is truth a matter of the representation of things which lack truth in themselves? Or of mere coherence? Or is truth a convenient if redundant way of indicating how one's language refers to things outside oneself? In her ambitious new book, Catherine Pickstock addresses these profound questions, arguing that epistemological approaches to truth either fail argumentatively or else offer only vacuity. She advances instead a bold metaphysical and realist appraisal which overcomes the Kantian impasse of 'subjective knowing' and ban on reaching beyond supposedly finite limits. Her book contends that in the end truth cannot be separated from the transcendent reality of the thinking soul.

There are two great traditions of natural-kinds realism: the modern, instituted by Mill and elaborated by Venn, Peirce, Kripke, Putnam, Boyd, and others; and the ancient, instituted by Aristotle, elaborated by the "medieval" Aristotelians, and eventually overthrown by Galilean and Newtonian physicists, by Locke, Leibniz, and Kant, and by Darwin. Whereas the former tradition has lately received the close attention it deserves, the latter has not. The Aristotelian Tradition of Natural Kinds and its Demise is meant to fill this gap. The volume's theme is the emergence of Aristotle's account of species, what Schoolmen such as Thomas Aquinas and William of Ockham did with this account, and the tacit if not explicit rejection of all such accounts in modern scientific theory. By tracing this history Stewart Umphrey shows that there have been not one but two relevant "scientific revolutions" or "paradigm shifts" in the history of natural philosophy. The first, brought about by Aristotle, may be viewed as a renewal of Presocratic natural philosophy in the light of Socrates's "second sailing" and his insistence that we attend to what is first for us. It features an eido-centric conception of living organisms and other enduring things, and strongly resists any reduction of physics to mathematics. The second revolution, brought about by seventeenth-century physics, features a nomo-centric view according to which what is fundamental in nature are not enduring individuals and their kinds, as we commonly suppose, but rather certain mathematizable relations among varying physical quantities. Umphrey examines and compares these two very different ways of understanding the natural order.

Marsilio Ficino (1433-99) directed the Platonic Academy in Florence, and it was the work of this Academy that gave the Renaissance in the 15th century its impulse and direction. During his childhood Ficino was selected by Cosimo de' Medici for an education in the humanities. Later Cosimo directed him to learn Greek and then to translate all the works of Plato into Latin. This enormous task he completed in about five years. He then wrote two important books, "The Platonic Theology" and "The Christian Religion", showing how the Christian religion and Platonic philosophy were proclaiming the same message. The extraordinary influence the Platonic Academy came to exercise over the age arose from the fact that its leading spirits were already seeking fresh inspiration from the ideals of the civilizations of Greece and Rome and especially from the literary and philosophical sources of those ideals. Florence was the cultural and artistic centre of Europe at the time and leading men in so many fields were drawn to the Academy: Lorenzo de'Medici (Florence's ruler), Alberti (the architect) and Poliziano (the poet). Moreover Ficino bound together an enormous circle of correspondents throughout Europe, from the Pope in Rome to John Colet in London, from Reuchlin in Germany to de Ganay in France. Published during his lifetime, "The Letters" have not previously been translated into English. Following the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478, Florence was at war with both the Pope (Sixtus IV) and King Ferdinand of Naples. Prompted by the appalling conditions under which Florence suffered as a result of the war, Ficino wrote eloquent letters to the three main protagonists. In his three letters to Sixtus, who was the main architect of the war, Ficino states in magnificent terms the true work of the Pope - to fish in the "deep sea of humanity", as did the Apostles. King Ferdinand of Naples spent most of his life in intrigue, not only against other states, but also against his own barons. Yet, Ficino addresses him in the words of his father, the admirable King Alfonso. This extraordinary letter, written in the form of a prophesy, speaks of his son's destiny on Earth. "In peace alone a splendid victory awaits you..., in victory, tranquility; in tranquility, a reverence and worship of Minerva" (wisdom). Negotiations for peace were in fact begun about five months later. In his letter to Lorenzo de 'Medici, Ficino presented, with dramatic clarity, the two sides of Lorenzo's nature. The letter may have prompted Lorenzo's bold visit to King Ferdinand's court and the ensuing negotiations for peace. In insisting on the reality of unity and peace in the face of war and division, Ficino uses a number of analogies. He speaks in at least two letters of all the colours emerging from simple white light, just as all the variety of the universe issues from one consciousness. "For the Sun, to be is to shine, to shine is to see, and to illuminate is to create all that is its own and to sustain what it has created."

Im Zentrum des Bandes steht die Frage nach dem Zusammenhang von Erkenntnis- und Wissenschaftstheorie im Kontext der mittelalterlichen Rezeption der Texte des Aristoteles an Hof und Universitaten, insbesondere der fur die Epistemologie einschlagigen Passagen in "De anima" und in den "Zweiten Analytiken" sowie ihre spatantike und arabische Vermittlung. In diesem komplexen Rezeptions- und vor allem Transformationsprozess werden zugleich die wissenschaftlichen und gesellschaftlich-institutionellen Grundlagen fur den okzidentalen Prozess der Rationalisierung und Aufklarung gelegt, deren "Dialektik" nicht nur die Geschichte Europas bis zum heutigen Tag bestimmt."

The hypostatic union of Christ, namely his being simultaneously human and divine, is one of the founding doctrines of Christian theology. In this book Michael Gorman presents the first full-length treatment of Aquinas's metaphysics of the hypostatic union. After setting out the historical and theological background, he examines Aquinas's metaphysical presuppositions, explains the basic elements of his account of the hypostatic union, and then enters into detailed discussions of four areas where it is more difficult to get a clear understanding of Aquinas's views, arguing that in some cases we must be content with speculative reconstructions that are true to the spirit of Aquinas's thought. His study pays close attention to the Latin texts and their chronology, and engages with a wide range of secondary literature. It will be of great interest to theologians as well as to scholars of metaphysics and medieval thought.

Too often the study of philosophical texts is carried out in ways that do not pay significant attention to how the ideas contained within them are presented, articulated, and developed. This was not always the case. The contributors to this collected work consider Jewish philosophy in the medieval period, when new genres and forms of written expression were flourishing in the wake of renewed interest in ancient philosophy. Many medieval Jewish philosophers were highly accomplished poets, for example, and made conscious efforts to write in a poetic style. This volume turns attention to the connections that medieval Jewish thinkers made between the literary, the exegetical, the philosophical, and the mystical to shed light on the creativity and diversity of medieval thought. As they broaden the scope of what counts as medieval Jewish philosophy, the essays collected here consider questions about how an argument is formed, how text is put into the service of philosophy, and the social and intellectual environment in which philosophical texts were produced.

Medieval thinkers were both puzzled and fascinated by the capacity of human beings to do what is morally wrong. In this book, Colleen McCluskey offers the first comprehensive examination of Thomas Aquinas' explanation for moral wrongdoing. Her discussion takes in Aquinas' theory of human nature and action, and his explanation of wrong action in terms of defects in human capacities including the intellect, the will, and the passions of the sensory appetite. She also looks at the notion of privation, which underlies Aquinas' account of wrongdoing, as well as his theory of the vices, which intersects with his basic account. The result is a thorough exploration of Aquinas' psychology which is both accessible and illuminating, and will be of interest to a wide range of readers in Aquinas studies, medieval philosophy, the history of theology, and the history of ideas.

In this book Han Thomas Adriaenssen offers the first comparative exploration of the sceptical reception of representationalism in medieval and early modern philosophy. Descartes is traditionally credited with inaugurating a new kind of scepticism by saying that the direct objects of perception are images in the mind, not external objects, but Adriaenssen shows that as early as the thirteenth century, critics had already found similar problems in Aquinas's theory of representation. He charts the attempts of philosophers in both periods to grapple with these problems, and shows how in order to address the challenges of scepticism and representation, modern philosophers in the wake of Descartes often breathed new life into old ideas, remoulding them in ways that we are just beginning to understand. His book will be valuable for historians interested in the medieval background to early modern thought, and to medievalists looking at continuity with the early modern period.

Als Valentin Weigel 1588 in Zschopau starb, hinterliess er ein umfangreiches handschriftliches Werk aus Traktaten, Predigten und Dialogen, das er zu seinen Lebzeiten nur einem kleinen Kreis von Freunden und Bekannten zuganglich gemacht hatte. Allen seinen Schriften ist eine lehrhafte Ausrichtung eigen; diese Beobachtung oeffnet den Blick auf den Seelsorger Weigel. Seinen Anliegen ist die vorliegende Arbeit nachgegangen, in der Weise, wie dies unter der gegebenen UEberlieferungslage moeglich ist, namlich durch die Berucksichtigung der historischen und kirchenpolitischen Verhaltnisse und durch die Analyse zentraler Schriften. Durch Ersteres erhellen sich die Bedingungen, unter denen eine so radikal introvertierte Glaubensform, wie Weigel sie vertritt, hatte entstehen koennen, Letzteres zeigt Weigels Strategien, in prekaren Lebenssituationen sichere Orientierung zu finden und anderen weiterzugeben.