This book offers a major reinterpretation of the `secularization' of medieval ideas by examining scholastic discussions on the nature of the common good. It challenges the view that the rediscovery of Aristotle was the primary catalyst for the emergence of a secular theory of the state. A detailed exposition of the content and the context of late scholastic political and ethical thought reveals that the roots of medieval 'secularization' were profoundly theological.

According to one recent account, in the “preliberal epoch” before the seventeenth century people did not think of individuals “as possessing inalienable rights to anything — much less life, liberty, property, or even the pursuit of happiness.” The statement is not true, but it is excusable. Compared with the flood of writing on the classical rights theories of the early modern period, there has been only a thin trickle of work on medieval ideas concerning individual natural rights, or human rights (...) as we say nowadays, rights inhering in the human person as such. Some modern authors see the seventeenth-century rights theories as a radical departure from ancient and medieval ways of thought; they are content to explain the ideas of Hobbes and Locke and Pufendorf by reference to some aspect of the intellectual, political, or economic life of the seventeenth century itself. C. B. MacPherson, for instance, emphasizing economic factors, inaugurated a minor academic industry when he interpreted Locke's teaching that everyone had a property right in his own person as a reflection of the possessive individualism of early-modern capitalism. (shrink)

Dans sa Somme, art. 34, Henri de Gand se penche sur les questions se rapportant à la vérité en Dieu . Il n’y a pas tant d’auteurs qui se sont donné la peine d’étudier ce problème à fond, nous fait-il remarquer1 — bien à tort, d’après lui. Car trois problèmes fondamentaux concernant la vérité se superposent: celui de la localisation, celui de la définition classique et celui de l’essence de la vérité.

IN THIS study I shall concentrate on three leading philosophical and theological thinkers of the thirteenth century: Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent, and Godfrey of Fontaines. Of these, Thomas Aquinas is surely the best known. But I have selected these three because their discussions of nonexisting possibles are sufficiently different from one another to illustrate some of the major solutions proposed to this issue at that time.

The volume addresses the historical context of Henry, e.g. his writings and his participation in the events of 1277; examines Henry’s theology, metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics; and studies Henry’s influence on John Duns Scotus and Pico della Mirandola.

This book is a major contribution to the history of philosophy in the later medieval period (1250-1350). It focuses on cognitive theory, a subject of intense investigation during these years. In fact many of the issues that dominate philosophy of mind and epistemology today - intentionality, mental representation, scepticism, realism - were hotly debated in the later medieval period. The book offers a careful analysis of these debates, primarily through the work of Thomas Aquinas, John Olivi, and William Ockham. Each (...) of these figures attempts to reconceptualise cognition along direct realist lines, criticising in the process the standard Aristotelian account. Though of primary interest to medieval philosophers, the book presupposes no background knowledge of the medieval period, and will therefore interest a broader community of philosophers concerned with the origins of contemporary cognitive theory. (shrink)

La philosophie medievale est en general mieux connue que ses auteurs. Ce livre s'interesse aux acteurs intellectuels auteurs des textes qui ont servi de materiaux a l'histoire de la philosophie medievale. Qui sont-ils? Dans quels lieux institutionnels et dans quelles conditions culturelles ont-ils travaille? Quelles conceptions se faisaient-ils de leur mission, de ses interets et de ses fins? Dementant un prejuge repandu, les scolastiques se revelent interesses a la politique culturelle; ils avaient une conscience aigue des enjeux epistemiques, ethiques et (...) sociaux de leurs pratiques professionnelles. Cette etude documente ces autorepresentations et les contraste au moyen d'un regard plus exterieur, qui decrit les pratiques savantes des auteurs scolastiques et reconstruit leurs differentes conceptions du savoir et de la societe chretienne. A l'etude des contextes intellectuels et sociaux, elle presente des mises en serie, de la division des sciences a la structuration du champ social en eveque, docteur, moine et laic. A la lecture de textes issus de divers milieux et temps, elle articule des distinctions, entre clerc et laic, eveque et docteur, arts liberaux et arts mecaniques, sedentaires et peregrins, adulte et enfant, homme et femme, centre et peripherie, chretien et non chretien, theologie et philosophie. Conditions culturelles du savoir et contenus doctrinaux sont approches par des methodes irreductiblement differentes, qui convergent cependant sur un meme objet, le texte qualifie de philosophique par son auteur ou par ses historiens. (shrink)

This volume offers a new and comprehensive study of a central aspect of Henry of Ghent's (+ 1293) philosophical thought: his understanding of metaphysics.

v. 1. A doctrine of divine illumination -- v. 2. God at the core of cognition.