This innovative volume investigates the meaning of 'something' in different recent philosophical traditions in order to rethink the logic and the unity of ontology, without forgetting to compare these views to earlier significative accounts in the history of philosophy. In fact, the revival of interest in "something" in the 19th and 20th centuries as well as in contemporary philosophy can easily be accounted for: it affords the possibility for asking the question: what is there? without engaging in predefined speculative assumptions The issue about "something" seems to avoid any naive approach to the question about what there is, so that it is treated in two main contemporary philosophical trends: "material ontology", which aims at taking "inventory" of what there is, of everything that is; and "formal ontology", which analyses the structural features of all there is, whatever it is. The volume advances cutting-edge debates on what is the first et the most general item in ontology, that is to say "something", because the relevant features of the conceptual core of something are: non-nothingness, otherness. Something means that one being is different from others. The relationality belongs to something.: Therefore, the volume advances cutting-edge debates in phenomenology, analytic philosophy, formal and material ontology, traditional metaphysics.

This book critically explores the development of radical criminological thought through the social, political and cultural history of the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. It follows on from the previous volume which examined Classical Greece until the emergence of the early Christian movement in the Roman empire. Through separate chapters, it discusses the key literature (myths, fairy tales and Shakespeare), religions and philosophers of the era, and the development of early radical views and issues over time. This book examines the links between the origins of radical criminology and its future. It speaks to those interested in the (pre)history of criminology and the historical production of criminological knowledge, drawing on Criminology, Sociology, Classics, History, Philosophy, Ancient Literature and Politics.

A celebration of Montaigne, the most enjoyable and yet profound of all Renaissance writers.
In the year 1570, at the age of thirty-seven, Michel de Montaigne gave up his job as a magistrate and retired to his chateau to brood on the deaths of his best friend, his father, his brother, and his firstborn child. But finding his mind agitated, rather than settled, by idleness, Montaigne began to write, giving birth to the "Essays"--a series of reflections on life in all its profundity and triviality. And, gradually, over the course of his writing, Montaigne turned from a philosophy of death to a philosophy of life, finding consolation in the most unlikely places--the touch of a hand, the smell of his doublet, the flavor of his wine, and the playfulness of his cat.

Montaigne (1533-92) is commonly regarded as an early modern sceptic, standing at the threshold of a new secular way of thinking. He is also known for his ground-breaking exploration of the 'subject' or the 'self'. Terence Cave discusses these and other key aspects of the Essais (Montaigne's major work) not as philosophical themes but as features in the mapping of a mental landscape: the project of the Essais is cognitive rather than philosophical. Similarly, he reads the Essais not as 'essays' in the literary sense but as 'trials' or 'soundings' in which the manner of writing - the shape of the sentences, the use of metaphors and other figures - is crucial. Taking passages from many different chapters of the Essais, this book guides the reader through Montaigne's investigation of the 'subtle shades and stirrings' of the mind.

This book examines Robert Grosseteste's often underrepresented ideas on education. It uniquely brings together academics from the fields of medieval history, modern science and contemporary education to shed new light on a fascinating medieval figure whose work has an enormous amount to offer anyone with an interest in our educational processes. The book locates Grosseteste as a key figure in the intellectual history of medieval Europe and positions him as an important thinker who concerned himself with the science of education and set out to elucidate the processes and purposes of learning. This book offers an important practical contribution to the discussion of the contemporary nature and purpose of many aspects of our education processes. This book will be of interest to students, researchers and academics in the disciplines of educational philosophy, medieval history, philosophy and theology.

This book promotes the research of present-day women working in ancient and medieval philosophy, with more than 60 women having contributed in some way to the volume in a fruitful collaboration. It contains 22 papers organized into ten distinct parts spanning the sixth century BCE to the fifteenth century CE. Each part has the same structure: it features, first, a paper which sets up the discussion, and then, one or two responses that open new perspectives and engage in further reflections. Our authors' contributions address pivotal moments and players in the history of philosophy: women philosophers in antiquity, Cleobulina of Rhodes, Plato, Lucretius, Bardaisan of Edessa, Alexander of Aphrodisias, Plotinus, Porphyry, Peter Abelard, Robert Kilwardby, William Ockham, John Buridan, and Isotta Nogarola. The result is a thought-provoking collection of papers that will be of interest to historians of philosophy from all horizons. Far from being an isolated effort, this book is a contribution to the ever-growing number of initiatives which endeavour to showcase the work of women in philosophy.

Amid the so-called "crisis of metaphysics"of the last several hundred years, philosophers in the 20th century re-encountered - and began a reappreciation of - the mediaeval thought of Thomas Aquinas. This crisis can be traced, at least in part, to modern Western philosophy's rejection of a specifying or "formal" cause in metaphysical analysis. Drawing from Aristotle of Stagira, Aquinas placed the formal cause on prominent display as the foundation for his metaphysics of esse. Yet nowhere did St. Thomas offer a systematic presentation of the key elements for this central doctrine. In response to this absence, Mirabilis dubitatio presents the reader with the doctrine's fundamental passages gleaned from Aquinas's entire opera omnia, as well as a systematic analysis of the doctrine which Aquinas himself called, a topic of "wondrous difficulty". Kaiser's work argues this central feature of Aquinas's thought - the formal cause - must be reintegrated into any metaphysical analysis in the 21st century. Such a reintegration can only begin through a presentation and understanding of Aquinas's coherent account as presented here.

Ethics was a central preoccupation of medieval philosophers, and medieval ethical thought is rich, diverse, and inventive. Yet standard histories of ethics often skip quickly over the medievals, and histories of medieval philosophy often fail to do justice to the centrality of ethical concerns in medieval thought. This volume presents the full range of medieval ethics in Christian, Islamic, and Jewish philosophy in a way that is accessible to a non-specialist and reveals the liveliness and sophistication of medieval ethical thought. In Part I there is a series of historical chapters presenting developmental and contextual accounts of Christian, Islamic, and Jewish ethics. Part II offers topical chapters on such central themes as happiness, virtue, law, and freedom, as well as on less-studied aspects of medieval ethics such as economic ethics, the ethical dimensions of mysticism, and sin and grace. This will be an important volume for students of ethics and medieval philosophy.

An integrative approach to Jewish and Muslim philosophy in al-Andalus Al-Andalus, the Iberian territory ruled by Islam from the eighth to the fifteenth centuries, was home to a flourishing philosophical culture among Muslims and the Jews who lived in their midst. Andalusians spoke proudly of the region's excellence, and indeed it engendered celebrated thinkers such as Maimonides and Averroes. Sarah Stroumsa offers an integrative new approach to Jewish and Muslim philosophy in al-Andalus, where the cultural commonality of the Islamicate world allowed scholars from diverse religious backgrounds to engage in the same philosophical pursuits. Stroumsa traces the development of philosophy in Muslim Iberia from its introduction to the region to the diverse forms it took over time, from Aristotelianism and Neoplatonism to rational theology and mystical philosophy. She sheds light on the way the politics of the day, including the struggles with the Christians to the north of the peninsula and the Fa t imids in North Africa, influenced philosophy in al-Andalus yet affected its development among the two religious communities in different ways. While acknowledging the dissimilar social status of Muslims and members of the religious minorities, Andalus and Sefarad highlights the common ground that united philosophers, providing new perspective on the development of philosophy in Islamic Spain.

This book explores a large variety of topics involved in Arabic philosophy. It examines concepts and issues relating to logic and mathematics, as well as metaphysics, ethics and aesthetics. These topics are all studied by different Arabic philosophers and scientists from different periods ranging from the 9th century to the 20th century, and are representative of the Arabic tradition. This is the first book dealing with the Arabic thought and philosophy and written only by women. The book brings together the work and contributions of an international group of female scholars and researchers specialized in the history of Arabic logic, philosophy and mathematics. Although all authors are women, the book does not enter into any kind of feminist trend. It simply highlights the contributions of female scholars in order to make them available to the large community of researchers interested in Arabic philosophy and to bring to the fore the presence and representativeness of female scholars in the field.

How do we judge whether we should be willing to follow the views of experts or whether we ought to try to come to our own, independent views? This book seeks the answer in medieval philosophical thought. In this engaging study into the history of philosophy and epistemology, Peter Adamson provides an answer to a question as relevant today as it was in the medieval period: how and when should we turn to the authoritative expertise of other people in forming our own beliefs? He challenges us to reconsider our approach to this question through a constructive recovery of the intellectual and cultural traditions of the Islamic world, the Byzantine Empire, and Latin Christendom. Adamson begins by foregrounding the distinction in Islamic philosophy between taqlīd, or the uncritical acceptance of authority, and ijtih�d, or judgment based on independent effort, the latter of which was particularly prized in Islamic law, theology, and philosophy during the medieval period. He then demonstrates how the Islamic tradition paves the way for the development of what he calls a “justified taqlīd,� according to which one develops the skills necessary to critically and selectively follow an authority based on their reliability. The book proceeds to reconfigure our understanding of the relation between authority and independent thought in the medieval world by illuminating how women found spaces to assert their own intellectual authority, how medieval writers evaluated the authoritative status of Plato and Aristotle, and how independent reasoning was deployed to defend one Abrahamic faith against the other. This clear and eloquently written book will interest scholars in and enthusiasts of medieval philosophy, Islamic studies, Byzantine studies, and the history of thought.

This sourcebook explores how the Middle Ages dealt with questions related to the mental life of creatures great and small. It makes accessible a wide range of key Latin texts from the fourth to the fourteenth century in fresh English translations. Specialists and non-specialists alike will find many surprising insights in this comprehensive collection of sources on the medieval philosophy of animal minds. The book's structure follows the distinction between the different aspects of the mental. The author has organized the material in three main parts: cognition, emotions, and volition. Each part contains translations of texts by different medieval thinkers. The philosophers chosen include well-known figures like Augustine, Albert the Great, and Thomas Aquinas. The collection also profiles the work of less studied thinkers like John Blund, (Pseudo-)Peter of Spain, and Peter of Abano. In addition, among those featured are several translated here into English for the first time. Each text comes with a short introduction to the philosopher, the context, and the main arguments of the text plus a section with bibliographical information and recommendations for further reading. A general introduction to the entire volume presents the basic concepts and questions of the philosophy of animal minds and explains how the medieval discussion relates to the contemporary debate. This sourcebook is valuable for anyone interested in the history of philosophy, especially medieval philosophy of mind. It will also appeal to scholars and students from other fields, such as psychology, theology, and cultural studies.

English Women's Spiritual Utopias, 1400-1700: New Kingdoms of Womanhood uncovers a tradition of women's utopianism that extends back to medieval women's monasticism, overturning accounts of utopia that trace its origins solely to Thomas More. As enclosed spaces in which women wielded authority that was unavailable to them in the outside world, medieval and early modern convents were self-consciously engaged in reworking pre-existing cultural heritage to project desired proto-feminist futures. The utopianism developed within the English convent percolated outwards to unenclosed women's spiritual communities such as Mary Ward's Institute of the Blessed Virgin and the Ferrar family at Little Gidding. Convent-based utopianism further acted as an unrecognized influence on the first English women's literary utopias by authors such as Margaret Cavendish and Mary Astell. Collectively, these female communities forged a mode of utopia that drew on the past to imagine new possibilities for themselves as well as for their larger religious and political communities. Tracking utopianism from the convent to the literary page over a period of 300 years, New Kingdoms writes a new history of medieval and early modern women's intellectual work and expands the concept of utopia itself.

This collected volume is inspired by the work of Edward Halper and is historically focused with contributions from leading scholars in Ancient and Medieval philosophy. Though its chapters cover a diverse range of topics in epistemology, ethics, and political philosophy, the collection is unified by the contributors' consideration of these topics in terms of the fundamental questions of metaphysics. The first section of the volume, "Knowing and Being," is dedicated to the connection between metaphysics and epistemology and includes chapters on Heraclitus, Plato, Aristotle, and the Ancient Daoists. The second section, "Goodness as Knowing How to Be," addresses ethics as an outgrowth of human metaphysical concerns and includes chapters on Plato, Aristotle, and Maimonides. Contributors include William H. F. Altman, Luc Brisson, Ronna Burger, Miriam Byrd, Owen Goldin, Lenn Goodman, Mitchell Miller, Richard Parry, Richard Patterson, Nastassja Pugliese, John Rist, May Sim, Roslyn Weiss, and Chad Wiener.

"This is one of the few books on Montaigne that fuses analytical skill with humane awareness of why Montaigne matters."--Harold Bloom, Sterling Professor of Humanities, Yale University

"In this exhilarating and learned book on Montaigne's essays, Lawrence D. Kritzman "contemporizes" the great writer. Reading him from today's deconstructive America, Kritzman discovers Montaigne always already deep into a dialogue with Jacques Derrida and psychoanalysis. One cannot but admire this fabulous act of translation."--H?l?ne Cixous

"Throughout his career, Lawrence D. Kritzman has demonstrated an intimate knowledge of Montaigne's essays and an engagement with French philosophy and critical theory. "The Fabulous Imagination" sheds precious new light on one of the founders of modern individualism and on his crucial quest for self-knowledge."--Jean Starobinski, professor emeritus of French literature, University of Geneva

Michel de Montaigne's (1533-1592) "Essais" was a profound study of human subjectivity. More than three hundred years before the advent of psychoanalysis, Montaigne embarked on a remarkable quest to see and imagine the self from a variety of vantages. Through the questions How shall I live? How can I know myself? he explored the significance of monsters, nightmares, and traumatic memories; the fear of impotence; the fragility of gender; and the act of anticipating and coping with death. In this book, Lawrence D. Kritzman traces Montaigne's development of the Western concept of the self. For Montaigne, imagination lies at the core of an internal universe that influences both the body and the mind. Imagination is essential to human experience. Although Montaigne recognized that the imagination can confuse the individual, "the fabulous imagination" can be curative, enabling the mind's "I" to sustain itself in the face of hardship.

Kritzman begins with Montaigne's study of the fragility of gender and its relationship to the peripatetic movement of a fabulous imagination. He then follows with the essayist's examination of the act of mourning and the power of the imagination to overcome the fear of death. Kritzman concludes with Montaigne's views on philosophy, experience, and the connection between self-portraiture, ethics, and oblivion. His reading demonstrates that the mind's I, as Montaigne envisioned it, sees by imagining that which is not visible, thus offering an alternative to the logical positivism of our age.

This long-awaited reissue of the 1969 Cornell edition of Alfarabi's Philosophy of Plato and Aristotle contains Muhsin Mahdi's substantial original introduction and a new foreword by Charles E. Butterworth and Thomas L. Pangle. The three parts of the book, "Attainment of Happiness," "Philosophy of Plato," and "Philosophy of Aristotle," provide a philosophical foundation for Alfarabi's political works.

Writing Plague: Language and Violence from the Black Death to COVID-19 brings a holistic and comparative perspective to "plague writing" from the later Middle Ages to the twenty-first century. It argues that while the human "hardware" has changed enormously between the medieval past and the present (urbanization, technology, mass warfare, and advances in medical science), the human "software" (emotional and psychological reactions to the shock of pandemic) has remained remarkably similar across time. Through close readings of works by medieval writers like Guillaume de Machaut, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century, select plays by Shakespeare, and modern "plague" fiction and film, Alfred Thomas convincingly demonstrates psychological continuities between the Black Death and COVID-19. In showing how in times of plague human beings repress their fears and fantasies and displace them onto the threatening "other," Thomas highlights the danger of scapegoating vulnerable minority groups such as Asian Americans and Jews in today's America. This wide-ranging study will thus be of interest not only to medievalists but also to students of modernity as well as the general reader.

Natural moral law stands at the center of Western ethics and jurisprudence and plays a leading role in interreligious dialogue. Although the greatest source of the classical natural law tradition is Thomas Aquinas's Treatise on Law, the Treatise is notoriously difficult, especially for nonspecialists. J. Budziszewski has made this formidable work luminous. This book - the first classically styled, line-by-line commentary on the Treatise in centuries - reaches out to philosophers, theologians, social scientists, students, and general readers alike. Budziszewski shows how the Treatise facilitates a dialogue between author and reader. Explaining and expanding upon the text in light of modern philosophical developments, he expounds this work of the great thinker not by diminishing his reasoning, but by amplifying it.

This book discusses fundamental topics on contemporary Ockhamism. The collected essays show how contemporary Ockhamism can impact areas of research such as semantics, metaphysics and also the philosophy of science. In addition, the volume hosts one historian of Medieval philosophy who investigates the way in which William of Ockham "in flesh and bone" construed time and, more generally, future contingency. The essays explore the different meanings of this theory. They cover three main topics, in particular. The first examines the thesis that sentences and propositions about the future have a definite truth value, without any ensuing commitment to determinism or fatalism. The second topic looks at the problem whether the branching-time model needs to countenance a privileged branch (the so-called Thin Red Line). Finally, the third topic considers the idea that there are so-called soft facts. These would be the subject matter of sentences and propositions verbally about the present or the past, but metaphysically about a later time, and which might change in the future. Overall, the book provides an updated and rigorous idea of the debate about Ockhamism. It gives readers a deeper understanding into this philosophical approach influenced by William of Ockham, characterized by the rejection of the Aristotelian idea that, in order to preserve the contingency of the future, future contingents must be deemed neither true nor false.

Petrarch was one of the founding fathers of Renaissance humanism, yet the nature and significance of his ideas are still widely debated. In this book, Gur Zak examines two central issues in Petrarch's works - his humanist philosophy and his concept of the self. Zak argues that both are defined by Petrarch's idea of care for the self. Overcome by a strong sense of fragmentation, Petrarch turned to the ancient idea that philosophy can bring harmony and wholeness to the soul through the use of spiritual exercises in the form of writing. Examining his vernacular poetry and his Latin works from both literary and historical perspectives, Zak explores Petrarch's attempts to use writing as a spiritual exercise, how his spiritual techniques absorbed and transformed ancient and medieval traditions of writing, and the tensions that arose from his efforts to care for the self through writing.

Tianyi Zhang offers in this study an innovative philosophical reconstruction of Shihab al-Din al-Suhrawardi's (d. 1191) Illuminationism. Commonly portrayed as either a theosophist or an Avicennian in disguise, Suhrawardi appears here as an original and hardheaded philosopher who adopts mysticism as a tool for philosophical investigation. Zhang makes use of Plato's cave allegory to explain Suhrawardi's Illuminationist project. Focusing on three areas-the theory of presential knowledge, the ontological discussion of mental considerations, and Light Metaphysics-Zhang convincingly reveals the Nominalist and Existential nature of Illuminationism and thereby proposes a new way of understanding how Suhrawardi's central philosophical ideas cohere.

Reflection on natural law reaches a highpoint during the Middle Ages. Not only do Christian thinkers work out the first systematic accounts of natural law and articulate the framework for subsequent reflection, the Jewish and Islamic traditions also develop their own canonical statements on the moral authority of reason vis-à-vis divine law. In the view of some, they thereby articulate their own theories of natural law. These various traditions of medieval reflection on natural law, and their interrelation, merit further study, particularly since they touch upon many current philosophical concerns. They grapple with the problem of ethical and religious pluralism. They consider whether universally valid standards of action and social life are accessible to those who rely on reason rather than divine law. In so doing, they develop sophisticated accounts of many central issues in metaethics, action theory, jurisprudence, and the philosophy of religion. However, do they reach a consensus about natural law, or do they end up defending incommensurable ethical frameworks? Do they confirm the value of arguments based on natural law or do they cast doubt on it? This collection brings together contributions from various expert scholars to explore these issues and the pluralism that exists within medieval reflection on natural law. It is the first one to study the relation between the natural law theories of these various traditions of medieval philosophy: Jewish, Islamic, Byzantine, and Latin. Each of the first four essays surveys the 'natural law theory' of one of the religious traditions of medieval philosophy—Jewish, Islamic, Byzantine, and Latin—and its relation to the others. The next four essays explore some of the alternative accounts of natural law that arise within the Latin tradition. They range over St. Bonaventure, Peter of Tarentaise, Matthew of Aquasparta, John Duns Scotus, and Marsilius of Padua.

This is a new translation of and commentary on Pico della Mirandola's most famous work, the Oration on the Dignity of Man. It is the first English edition to provide readers with substantial notes on the text, essays that address the work's historical, philosophical and theological context, and a survey of its reception. Often called the 'Manifesto of the Renaissance', this brief but complex text was originally composed in 1486 as the inaugural speech for an assembly of intellectuals, which could have produced one of the most exhaustive metaphysical, theological and psychological debates in history, had Pope Innocent VIII not forbidden it. This edition of the Oration reflects the spirit of the original text in bringing together experts in different fields. Not unlike the debate Pico optimistically anticipated, the resulting work is superior to the sum of its parts.