This work argues that teleological motives lie at the heart of Kant's critical philosophy and that a precise analysis of teleological structures can both illuminate the basic strategy of its fundamental arguments and provide a key to understanding its unity. It thus aims, through an examination of each of Kant's major writings, to provide a detailed interpretation of his claim that philosophy in the true sense must consist of a teleologia rationis humanae.The author argues that Kant's critical philosophy forged a new link between traditional teleological concepts and the basic structure of rationality, one that would later inform the dynamic conception of reason at the heart of German Idealism. The process by which this was accomplished began with Kant's development of a uniquely teleological conception of systematic unity already in the precritical period. The individual chapters of this work attempt to show how Kant adapted and refined this conception of systematic unity so that it came to form the structural basis for the critical philosophy.

Mappa mundi texts and images present a panorama of the medieval world-view, c.1300; the Hereford map studied in close detail. Filled with information and lore, mappae mundi present an encyclopaedic panorama of the conceptual "landscape" of the middle ages. Previously objects of study for cartographers and geographers, the value of medieval maps to scholars in other fields is now recognised and this book, written from an art historical perspective, illuminates the medieval view of the world represented in a group of maps of c.1300. Naomi Kline's detailed examination of the literary, visual, oral and textual evidence of the Hereford mappa mundi and others like it, such as the Psalter Maps, the '"Sawley Map", and the Ebstorf Map, places them within the larger context of medieval art and intellectual history. The mappa mundi in Hereford cathedral is at the heart of this study: it has more than one thousand texts and images of geographical subjects, monuments, animals, plants, peoples, biblical sites and incidents, legendary material, historical information and much more; distinctions between "real" and "fantastic" are fluid; time and space are telescoped, presenting past, present, and future. Naomi Kline provides, for the first time, a full and detailed analysis of the images and texts of the Hereford map which, thus deciphered, allow comparison with related mappae mundi as well as with other texts and images. NAOMI REED KLINE is Professor of Art History at Plymouth State College.

How can the Body and Blood of Christ, without ever leaving heaven, come to be really present on eucharistic altars where the bread and wine still seem to be? Thirteenth and fourteenth century Christian Aristotelians thought the answer had to be "transubstantiation."
Acclaimed philosopher, Marilyn McCord Adams, investigates these later medieval theories of the Eucharist, concentrating on the writings of Thomas Aquinas, Giles of Rome, Duns Scotus, and William Ockham, with some reference to Peter Lombard, Hugh of St. Victor, and Bonaventure. She examines how their efforts to formulate and integrate this theological datum provoked them to make significant revisions in Aristotelian philosophical theories regarding the metaphysical structure and location of bodies, differences between substance and accidents, causality and causal powers, and fundamental types of change. Setting these developments in the theological context that gave rise to the question draws attention to their understandings of the sacraments and their purpose, as well as to their understandings of the nature and destiny of human beings.
Adams concludes that their philosophical modifications were mostly not ad hoc, but systematic revisions that made room for transubstantiation while allowing Aristotle still to describe what normally and naturally happens. By contrast, their picture of the world as it will be (after the last judgment) seems less well integrated with their sacramental theology and their understandings of human nature.

This book examines how epistemology was reinvented by Ibn Sina, an influential philosopher-scientist of the classical Islamic world who was known to the West by the Latinised name Avicenna. It explains his theory of knowledge in which intentionality acts as an interaction between the mind and the world. This, in turn, led Ibn Sina to distinguish an operation of intentionality specific to the generation of numbers. The author argues that Ibn Sina's transformation of philosophy is one of the major stages in the de-hellinisation movement of the Greek heritage that was set off by the advent of the Arabic-Islamic civilisation. Readers first learn about Ibn Sina's unprecedented investigation into the concept of the number and his criticism of such Greek thought as Plato's realism, Pythagoreans' empiricism, and Ari stotle's conception of existence. Next, coverage sets out the basics of Ibn Sina's theory of knowledge needed for the construction of numbers. It describes how intentionality turns out to be key in showing the ontological dependence of numbers as well as even more critical to their construction. In describing the various mental operations that make mathematical objects intentional entities, Ibn Sina developed powerful arguments and subtle analyses to show us the extent our mental life depends on intentionality. This monograph thoroughly explores the epistemic dimension of this concept, which, the author believes, can also explain the actual genesis and evolution of mathematics by the human mind.

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.

Francisco Suarez was a principal figure in the transition from scholastic to modern natural law, summing up a long and rich tradition and providing much material both for adoption and controversy in the seventeenth century and beyond. Most of the selections translated in this volume are from 'On the Laws and God the Law-Giver (De legibus ac Deo legislatore, 1612)', a work that is considered one of Suarez' greatest achievements. Working within the framework originally elaborated by Thomas Aquinas, Suarez treated humanity as the subject of four different laws, which together guide human beings toward the ends of which they are capable. Suarez achieved a double objective in his systematic account of moral activity. First, he examined and synthesized the entire scholastic heritage of thinking on this topic, identifying the key issues of debate and the key authors who had formulated the different positions most incisively. Second, he went beyond this heritage of authorities to present a new account of human moral action and its relationship to the law. Treading a fine line between those to whom moral directives are purely a matter of reason and those to whom they are purely a matter of a commanding will, Suarez attempted to show how both human reason and the command of the lawgiver dictate the moral space of human action.

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.

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.

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.

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

Originally published in 1940, this book contains a succinct introduction to Boethius, the influential medieval philosopher who was writing during the final days of the Western Roman Empire. Barrett keeps the general reader in mind as she explains Boethius' philosophy and his role in keeping Greek thinking available to his fellow Romans even as they were being conquered by the Ostrogoths. This book will be of value to anyone with an interest in ancient thought and in Late Antique philosophy.

Very Short Introductions: Brilliant, Sharp, Inspiring This book provides an introduction to the most important philosopher of the Islamic world, Ibn Sīn�, often known in English by his Latinized name Avicenna. After introducing the man and his works, with an overview of the historical context in which he lived, the book devotes chapters to the different areas of Ibn Sīn�'s thought. Among the topics covered are his innovations in logic, his theory of the human soul and its powers, the relation between his medical writings and his philosophy, and his metaphysics of existence. Particular attention is given to two famous arguments: his flying man thought experiment and the so-called “demonstration of the truthful,� a proof for the existence of God as the Necessary Existent. A distinctive feature of the book is its attention to the relationship between Ibn Sīn� and Islamic rational theology (kal�m): in which we see how Ibn Sīn� responded to this tradition in many areas of his thought. A final chapter looks at Ibn Sīn�'s legacy in both the Islamic world and in Latin Christendom. Here Adamson focuses on the critical responses to Ibn Sīn� in subsequent generations by such figures as al-Ghaz�lī, al-Suhrawardī, and Fakhr al-Dīn al-R�zī. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

A humorous and philosophical trip through life, from the New York Times-bestselling coauthor of Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar . . . Daniel Klein's fans have fallen in love with the warm, humorous, and thoughtful way he shows how philosophy resonates in everyday life. Readers of his popular books Plato and a Platypus Walk into a Bar . . . and Travels with Epicurus come for enlightenment and stay for the entertainment. As a young college student studying philosophy, Klein filled a notebook with short quotes from the world's greatest thinkers, hoping to find some guidance on how to live the best life he could. Now, from the vantage point of his eighth decade, Klein revisits the wisdom he relished in his youth with this collection of philosophical gems, adding new ones that strike a chord with him at the end of his life. From Epicurus to Emerson and Camus to the theologian Reinhold Niebuhr-whose words provided the title of this book-each pithy extract is annotated with Klein's inimitable charm and insights. In these pages, our favorite jokester-philosopher tackles life's biggest questions, leaving us chuckling and enlightened.