Das Phänomen des Bösen prägt die moderne Welt ganz entscheidend. Dennoch gibt es gerade heute die Tendenz, den Begriff des Bösen zu verdrängen. Auf seinen Bedeutungsgehalt kann aber nicht verzichtet werden. Dies zeigt die Studie, indem sie ihren Ansatz bei der Augustinischen und der Kantischen Position über das Böse nimmt. In ihrem vergleichenden Teil kommt sie zu dem Ergebnis, daß es begriffsgeschichtlich hier zu einem fundamentalen Umbruch gekommen ist. Die ontologische Perspektive wurde durch die heteronome abgelöst. Besonders herausgearbeitet wird dabei die Dimension der sittlichen Freiheit. Sie ist eine notwendige Voraussetzung für das Böse, die auch unter heutigen Bedingungen relevant ist. Methodisch verfolgt die Arbeit eine kontextorientierte Interpretation. Das Böse wird so immer auch im Kontrast zum Guten bestimmt. Sein systematischer Ort im jeweiligen Grundtyp ethischer Theorie wird aufgezeigt.

"One of the most provocative new books of the year, and, for me, mindblowing." -Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind "Kripal makes many sympathetic points about the present spiritual state of America. . . . [He] continues to believe that spirituality and science should not contradict each other." -New York Times Book Review "Kripal prompts us to reflect on our personal assumptions, as well as the shared assumptions that create and maintain our institutions. . . . [His] work will likely become more and more relevant to more and more areas of inquiry as the century unfolds. It may even open up a new space for Americans to reevaluate the personal and cultural narratives they have inherited, and to imagine alternative futures." -Los Angeles Review of Books A "flip," writes Jeffrey J. Kripal, is "a reversal of perspective," "a new real," often born of an extreme, life-changing experience. The Flip is Kripal's ambitious, visionary program for unifying the sciences and the humanities to expand our minds, open our hearts, and negotiate a peaceful resolution to the culture wars. Combining accounts of rationalists' spiritual awakenings and consciousness explorations by philosophers, neuroscientists, and mystics within a framework of the history of science and religion, Kripal compellingly signals a path to mending our fractured world. Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University and is the associate director of the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. He has previously taught at Harvard Divinity School and Westminster College and is the author of eight books, including The Flip. He lives in Houston, Texas.

Agonistes comprises a collection of essays presented by his friends and colleagues to Denis O'Brien, former Directeur de recherche at the Centre Nationale de Recherche Scientifique, representing the full range of his scholarly interests in the field of ancient philosophy, from the Presocratics, through Plato, Aristotle and Hellenistic philosophy, to Plotinus and later Neoplatonism. The honorand himself leads off with a stimulating Apologia, sketching the development of his scholarly interests and dwelling on the issues that have chiefly concerned him. The contributions then follow in chronological order, under four headings: I From the Presocratics to Plato (Frere, Brancacci); II From Plato to the Stoics (Brisson, Casertano, Dixsaut, KA1/4hn, McCabe, Narcy, Rowe, Goulet); III Plotinus and the Neoplatonist Tradition (O'Meara, Sakonji, Gersh, Steel, Dillon, Smith); IV Saint Augustine and After (Pepin, Rist, Brague/Freudenthal). They comprise a significant representation of the most distinguished scholars both on the continent and in the British Isles, and fairly represent the wide influence which Denis O'Brien has had on his contemporaries. The volume includes also a full bibliography of O'Brien's works.

We can hear the universe! This was the triumphant proclamation at a February 2016 press conference announcing that the Laser Interferometer Gravity Observatory (LIGO) had detected a "transient gravitational-wave signal." What LIGO heard in the morning hours of September 14, 2015 was the vibration of cosmic forces unleashed with mind-boggling power across a cosmic medium of equally mind-boggling expansiveness: the transient ripple of two black holes colliding more than a billion years ago. The confirmation of gravitational waves sent tremors through the scientific community, but the public imagination was more captivated by the sonic translation of the cosmic signal, a sound detectable only through an act of carefully attuned listening. As astrophysicist Szabolcs Marka remarked, "Until this moment, we had our eyes on the sky and we couldn't hear the music. The skies will never be the same." Taking in hand this current "discovery" that we can listen to the cosmos, Andrew Hicks argues that sound-and the harmonious coordination of sounds, sources, and listeners-has always been an integral part of the history of studying the cosmos. Composing the World charts one constellation of musical metaphors, analogies, and expressive modalities embedded within a late-ancient and medieval cosmological discourse: that of a cosmos animated and choreographed according to a specifically musical aesthetic. The specific historical terrain of Hicks' discussion centers upon the world of twelfth-century philosophy, and from there he offers a new intellectual history of the role of harmony in medieval cosmological discourse, a discourse which itself focused on the reception and development of Platonism. Hicks illuminates how a cosmological aesthetics based on the "music of the spheres" both governed the moral, physical, and psychic equilibrium of the human, and assured the coherence of the universe as a whole. With a rare convergence of musicological, philosophical, and philological rigor, Hicks presents a narrative tour through medieval cosmology with reflections on important philosophical movements along the way, raising connections to Cartesian dualism, Uexkull's theoretical biology, and Deleuze and Guattari's musically inspired language of milieus and (de)territorialization. Hicks ultimately suggests that the models of musical cosmology popular in late antiquity and the twelfth century are relevant to our modern philosophical and scientific undertakings. Impeccably researched and beautifully written, Composing the World will resonate with a variety of readers, and it encourages us to rethink the role of music and sound within our greater understanding of the universe.

This book explores how humans in the Renaissance lived with, attended to, and considered the minds, feelings, and sociality of other creatures. It examines how Renaissance literature and natural history display an unequal creaturely world: all creatures were categorized hierarchically. However, post-Cartesian readings of Shakespeare and other Renaissance literature have misunderstood Renaissance hierarchical creaturely relations, including human relations. Using critical animal studies work and new materialist theory, Bach argues that attending closely to creatures and objects in texts by Shakespeare and other writers exposes this unequal world and the use and abuse of creatures, including people. The book also adds significantly to animal studies by showing how central bird sociality and voices were to Renaissance human culture, with many believing that birds were superior to some humans in song, caregiving, and companionship. Bach shows how Descartes, a central figure in the transition to modern ideas about creatures, lived isolated from humans and other creatures and denied ancient knowledge about other creatures' minds, especially bird minds. As significantly, Bach shows how and why Descartes' ideas appealed to human grandiosity. Asking how Renaissance categorizations of creatures differ so much from modern classifications, and why those modern classifications have shaped so much animal studies work, this book offers significant new readings of Shakespeare's and other Renaissance texts. It will contribute to a range of fields, including Renaissance literature, history, animal studies, new materialism, and the environmental humanities.

With selections of philosophers from Plotinus to Bruno, this new anthology provides significant learning support and historical context for the readings along with a wide variety of pedagogical assists. Featuring biographical headnotes, reading introductions, study questions, as well as specialPrologues andPhilosophical Overviews, this anthology offers a unique set of critical thinking promtps to help students understand and appreciate the philosophical concepts under discussion.Philosophical Bridges" discuss how the work of earlier thinkers would influence philosophers to come and place major movements in a contemporary context, showing students how the schools of philosophy interrelate and how the various philosophies apply to the world today. In addition to this volume of Medieval Philosophy, a comprehensive survey of the whole of Western philosophical history and other individual volumes for each of the major historical eras are also available for specialized courses.

This book shows how the mature writings of Thomas Aquinas though written in the thirteenth century have much to offer the human mind and the relationship between intellect and will, body and soul.

eBook available with sample pages: 0203004949

Remembering Boethius explores the rich intersection between the reception of Boethius and the literary construction of aristocratic identity, focusing on a body of late-medieval vernacular literature that draws on the Consolation of Philosophy to represent and reimagine contemporary experiences of exile and imprisonment. Elizabeth Elliott presents new interpretations of English, French, and Scottish texts, including Machaut's Confort d'ami, Remede de Fortune, and Fonteinne amoureuse, Jean Froissart's Prison amoureuse, Thomas Usk's Testament of Love, and The Kingis Quair, reading these texts as sources contributing to the development of the reader's moral character. These writers evoke Boethius in order to articulate and shape personal identities for public consumption, and Elliott's careful examination demonstrates that these texts often write not one life, but two, depicting the relationship between poet and aristocratic patron. These works associate the reception of wisdom with the cultivation of memory, and in turn, illuminate the contemporary reception of the Consolation as a text that itself focuses on memory and describes a visionary process of education that takes place within Boethius's own mind. In asking how and why writers remember Boethius in the Middle Ages, this book sheds new light on how medieval people imagined, and reimagined, themselves.

"Rene Descartes'" Meditations on First Philosophy "In Focus" contains the excellent and popular Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross translation of Rene Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy," It also contains a portion of the "Replies to Objections II," in which Descartes discusses how the method employed in the "Meditations," which he calls "analysis," differs from the method of "synthesis" employed by the geometer.
In his introduction, Stanley Tweyman provides a fresh and detailed discussion of the relationship between Descartes' "Rules" "for the Direction of the Mind" and the method of "analysis," and their applications to the "Meditations," The six critical papers drawn together in this book present a broad and exegetical commentary on the "Meditations" and give an indication of the diversity of scholarly opinion which exists on the topic of method in Descartes' philosophy. An extensive bibliography is also included.
Contributors: D. M. Clarke, E. Curley, D. Garber, L. Cohen, J. Hintikka, Georges Moyal, and Stanley Tweyman.

This volume contains the popular Elizabeth S. Haldane and G.R.T. Ross' translation of Rene Descartes' "Meditations on First Philosophy", and in addition a portion of the "Replies to Objections II", in which Descartes discusses how the method employed in the "Meditations", which he calls "analysis", differs from the method of "synthesis" employed by the general geometer. In the editor's introduction, Stanley Tweyman provides a detailed discussion of the relationship between Descartes' "Rule for the Direction of the Mind" and the method of "analysis", insofar as each has application to the "Meditations". The six critical papers which Professor Tweyman has drawn together in this book present a broad and exegetical commentary on the "Meditations" and give an indication of the diversity of scholarly opinion which exists on the topic of method in Descartes' philosophy. An extensive bibliography is also included.

In the ancient world being a philosopher was a practical alternative to being a Christian. Philosophical systems offered intellectual, practical and moral codes for living. By the Middle Ages however philosophy was largely, though inconsistently, incorporated into Christian belef. From the end of the Roman Empire to the Reformation and Renaissance of the sixteenth century Christian theologians had a virtual monopoly on higher education. The complex interaction between theology and philosophy, which was the result of the efforts of Christian leaders and thinkers to assimilate the most sophisticated ideas of science and secular learning into their own system of thought, is the subject of this book. Augustine, as the most widely read author in the Middle Ages, is the starting point. Dr Evans then discusses the classical sources in general which the medieval scholar would have had access to when he wanted to study philosophy and its theological implications. Part One ends with an analysis of the problems of logic, language and rhetoric. In Part Two the sequence of topics - God, cosmos, man - follows the outline of the summa, or systematic encyclopedia of theology.

Epicureanism has had a long and complex history. Established in Greece in the fourth century BC in response to the peculiar needs of a new age, it gained an immediate and widespread following throughout the Mediterranean world, and in Roman times competed on equal terms with Stoicism for the allegiance of the citizens of the empire. It was singled out by the early Church as a dangerous enemy of the faith, and the philosophy of the Garden became the target of a bitter campaign of denunciation and distortion; it was a one-dimensional Epicurus - the champion of earthly delights - who kept the name of the School alive throughout the Middle Ages. Coinciding with a renewed interest in the antique world, an Epicureanism truer to its classical parent re-emerged to add an important dimension to Renaissance philosophical debate, and in the 16th and 17th centuries, Epicurean theory contributed significantly to the growth of the new science of physics. Howard Jones' book, which is divided equally between the classical and post-classical eras, documents the story as it unfolds. This book should be of interest to undergraduates, postgraduates and academics of classics, medieval philosophy, histo

Sixteenth century philosophy was a unique synthesis of several philosophical frameworks, a blend of old and new, including but not limited to Scholasticism, Humanism, Neo-Thomism, Aristotelianism, and Stoicism. Unlike most overviews of this period, The Routledge Companion to Sixteenth Century Philosophy does not simplify this colorful era by applying some traditional dichotomies, such as the misleading line once drawn between scholasticism and humanism. Instead, the Companion closely covers an astonishingly diverse set of topics: philosophical methodologies of the time, the importance of the discovery of the new world, the rise of classical scholarship, trends in logic and logical theory, Nominalism, Averroism, the Jesuits, the Reformation, Neo-stoicism, the soul's immortality, skepticism, the philosophies of language and science and politics, cosmology, the nature of the understanding, causality, ethics, freedom of the will, natural law, the emergence of the individual in society, the nature of wisdom, and the love of god. Throughout, the Companion seeks not to compartmentalize these philosophical matters, but instead to show that close attention paid to their continuity may help reveal both the diversity and the profound coherence of the philosophies that emerged in the sixteenth century. The Companion's 27 chapters are published here for the first time, and written by an international team of scholars, and accessible for both students and researchers.

An introduction to philosophy in the Latin West (1150-1350) combines an historical approach with philosophical analysis of thirteenth and fourteenth-century writing in terms comprehensible to the modern reader.

Our world s cultural circles are permeated by the philosophical influences of existentialism and phenomenology. Two contemporary quests to elucidate rationality took their inspirations from Kierkegaard s existentialism plumbing the subterranean source of subjective experience and Husserl s phenomenology focusing on the constitutive aspect of rationality. Yet, both contrary directions mingled readily in common vindication of full reality.

In the inquisitive minds (Scheler, Heidegger, Sartre, Stein, Merleau-Ponty, et al.), a fruitful cross-pollination of insights, ideas, approaches, fused in one powerful wave disseminating throughout all domains of thought.

Existentialist rejection of ratiocination and speculation together with Husserl s shift to the genesis of rapproches philosophy and literature (Wahl, Marcel, Berdyaev, Wojtyla, Tischner, etc.), while the foundational underpinnings of language (Wittgenstein, Derrida, etc.) opened the "hidden" behind the "veils" (Sezgin and Dominguez-Rey)."

Theophrastus of Eresus was Aristotle's pupil and successor as head of the Peripatetic School. He is best known as the author of the amusing Characters and two ground-breaking works in botany, but his writings extend over the entire range of Hellenistic philosophic studies. Volume 5 of Rutgers University Studies in Classical Humanities focuses on his scientific work. The volume contains new editions of two brief scientific essays-On Fish and Afeteoro/o^y-accompanied by translations and commentary. Among the contributions are: "Peripatetic Dialectic in the De sensibus," Han Baltussen; "Empedocles" Theory of Vision and Theophrastus' De sensibus," David N. Sedley; "Theophrastus on the Intellect," Daniel Devereux; "Theophrastus and Aristotle on Animal Intelligence," Eve Browning Cole; "Physikai doxai and Problemata physika from Aristotle to Agtius (and Beyond)," Jap Mansfield; "Xenophanes or Theophrastus? An Aetian Doxographicum on the Sun," David Runia; "Place1 in Context: On Theophrastus, Fr. 21 and 22 Wimmer," Keimpe Algra; "The Meteorology of Theophrastus in Syriac and Arabic Translation," Hans Daiber; "Theophrastus' Meteorology, Aristotle and Posidonius," Ian G. Kidd; "The Authorship and Sources of the Peri Semeion Ascribed to Theophrastus," Patrick Cronin; "Theophrastus, On Fish" Robert W. Sharpies.

How are processes of vision, perception, and sensation conceived in the Renaissance? How are those conceptions made manifest in the arts? The essays in this volume address these and similar questions to establish important theoretical and philosophical bases for artistic production in the Renaissance and beyond. The essays also attend to the views of historically significant writers from the ancient classical period to the eighteenth century, including Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, St Augustine, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), Ibn al-Haytham (Alhazen), Ibn Sahl, Marsilio Ficino, Nicholas of Cusa, Leon Battista Alberti, Gian Paolo Lomazzo, Gregorio Comanini, John Davies, Rene Descartes, Samuel van Hoogstraten, and George Berkeley. Contributors carefully scrutinize and illustrate the effect of changing and evolving ideas of intellectual and physical vision on artistic practice in Florence, Rome, Venice, England, Austria, and the Netherlands. The artists whose work and practices are discussed include Fra Angelico, Donatello, Leonardo da Vinci, Filippino Lippi, Giovanni Bellini, Raphael, Parmigianino, Titian, Bronzino, Johannes Gumpp and Rembrandt van Rijn. Taken together, the essays provide the reader with a fresh perspective on the intellectual confluence between art, science, philosophy, and literature across Renaissance Europe.

How can beliefs, which are immaterial, be about things? How can the body be the seat of thought? This book traces the historical roots of the cognitive sciences and examines pre-modern conceptualizations of the mind as presented and discussed in the tradition of commentaries on Aristotle's De anima from 1200 until 1650. It explores medieval and Renaissance views on questions which nowadays would be classified under the philosophy of mind, that is, questions regarding the identity and nature of the mind and its cognitive relation to the material world. In exploring the development of scholastic ideas, concepts, arguments, and theories in the tradition of commentaries on De anima, and their relation to modern philosophy, this book dissolves the traditional periodization into Middle Ages, Renaissance and early modern times. By placing key issues in their philosophico-historical context, not only is due attention paid to Aristotle's own views, but also to those of hitherto little-studied medieval and Renaissance commentators.

This volume, originally published in 1990, delineates the transition Descartes effects from a prevalent medieval conception of understanding to a modern conception of it. Through the examination of the continuities and discontinuities between Descartes' account of the understanding and that of high scholasticism, a characterization emerges of two way in which the understanding is autonomous in Descartes' view. These two sorts of autonomy shed light on the origin of a set of related concerns that give modern philosophy its coherence, setting it apart from medieval philosophy as a distinct tradition. The first sort - the independence of the understanding of the senses - creates the modern problem of scepticism with regard to the external world. The second sort, concerning the ontological status of the mind, provides the background against which modern discussions of the mind/body problem take shape.

Maintaining that it is impossible to understand the work of a philosopher without understanding the previous history of thought and the contemporaneous developments, this book, originally published in 1932, is an in-depth study of Descartes' philosophy with a strong emphasis on the historical approach. It covers Descartes' early life and education, before continuing to discuss his method of doubt, the existence of God, the scientific interpretation of nature, the unity of knowledge, the attributes of God and free-will.

Originally published in 1940, this book provides a thorough discussion of Rene Descartes philosophy of metaphysics, examining the three major points of the mind and body, freedom of the will and religion and science. Specific chapters are devoted to the Cartesian theory and the Meditations, in particular the Sixth.

When originally published in 1952, this book filled a gap in the history of philosophy and science and remains an important work today, because it puts the main mathematical and physical discoveries of Descartes in an accessible form, for the benefit of English readers. Descartes is acknowledged to be the founder of modern mathematics, through his invention of analytical geometry and this volume charts Descartes' role in bringing a unity into algebra and geometry and the development of mathematics into a discipline which could be properly analysed. Carefully paraphrasing the Geometrie, this volume retains much of Descartes' original notation as well as the original diagrams. The volume also discusses the considerable contribution that Descartes made to the physical sciences which involved accurate work in optics, light, sight and colour.

This fourth volume traces the history of Renaissance philosophy and seventeenth century rationalism, covering Descartes and the birth of modern philosophy.

In 1968, at the climax of the sixties, Os Guinness visited the United States for the first time. There he was struck by an impression he'd already felt in England and elsewhere: beneath all the idealism and struggle for freedom was a growing disillusionment and loss of meaning. "Underneath the efforts of a generation," he wrote, "lay dust." Even more troubling, Christians seemed uninformed about the cultural shifts and ill-equipped to respond. Guinness took on these concerns by writing his first book, The Dust of Death. In this milestone work, leading social critic Guinness provides a wide-ranging, farsighted analysis of one of the most pivotal decades in Western history, the 1960s. He examines the twentieth-century developments of secular humanism, the technological society, and the alternatives offered by the counterculture, including radical politics, Eastern religions, and psychedelic drugs. As all of these options have increasingly failed to deliver on their promises, Guinness argues, Westerners desperately need another alternative-a Third Way. This way "holds the promise of realism without despair, involvement without frustration, hope without romanticism." It offers a stronger humanism, one with a solid basis for its ideals, combining truth and beauty. And this Third Way can be found only in the rediscovery and revival of the historic Christian faith. First published in 1973, The Dust of Death is now back in print as part of the IVP Signature Collection, featuring a new design and new preface by the author. This classic will help readers of every generation better understand the cultural trajectory that continues to shape us and how Christians can still offer a better way.

The first collection of essays devoted to the Arabic philosopher Averroes's brilliant Commentary on Plato's "Republic," which survived the medieval period only in Hebrew and Latin translations. The first collection of essays devoted entirely to the medieval philosopher Averroes's Commentary on Plato's "Republic" includes a variety of contributors from across several disciplines and countries. The anthology aims to establish Averroes as a great philosopher in his own right, with special and unique insight into the world of Islam, as well as a valuable commentator on Plato. A major feature of the book is the first published English translation of Shlomo Pines's 1957 essay, written in Hebrew, on Averroes. The volume explores many aspects of Averroes's philosophy, including its teachings on poetry, philosophy, religion, law, and government. Other sections trace both the inspiration Averroes's work drew from past philosophers and the influence it had on future generations, especially in Jewish and Christian Europe. Scholars of medieval philosophy, ancient philosophy, Jewish studies, and the history of political thought more generally will find important insights in this volume. The anthology is also intended to provide the necessary background for teachers aiming to introduce Averroes's commentary into the classroom. With the Republic regularly appearing near the top of lists of the most frequently taught books in the history of philosophy, this volume shows how the most important medieval commentary on it deserves a place in the curriculum as well.