The essays collected in Persecution and the Art of Writing all deal with one problem--the relation between philosophy and politics. Here, Strauss sets forth the thesis that many philosophers, especially political philosophers, have reacted to the threat of persecution by disguising their most controversial and heterodox ideas.

introduction Dialectic and the notion of tradition The past does not pull back but presses forward. (Hannah Arendt 1977: 10) Through the confrontation over ...

This book offers a major reassessment of the philosophy of Peter Abelard (1079-1142) which argues that he was not, as usually presented, a predominantly critical thinker but a constructive one. By way of evidence the author offers new analyses of frequently discussed topics in Abelard's philosophy, and examines other areas such as the nature of substances and accidents, cognition, the definition of 'good' and 'evil', virtues and merit, and practical ethics in detail for the first time. The book also includes (...) a discussion of Abelard's life and works, and considers problems of chronology and canon (including the question of the authenticity of the correspondence with Heloise). '... not only an outstanding exposition of Abelard's philosophy, but a work that opens up for specialists and non-specialists the world of twelfth-century thought.' The Times Literary Supplement. (shrink)

John Buridan was the most famous philosophy teacher of his time, and probably the most influential. In this important new book, Jack Zupko offers the first systematic exposition of Buridan's thought to appear in any language. Zupko uses Buridan's own conception of the order and practice of philosophy to depict the most salient features of his thought, beginning with his views on the nature of language and logic and then illustrating their application to a series of topics in metaphysics, natural (...) philosophy, and ethics. Part 1 of John Buridan considers the picture of language and logic developed in Buridan's Summulae de dialectica. Buridan systematically overhauled the logic he first learned and later taught at the University of Paris, redeeming the older tradition of Aristotelian logic in terms, propositions, and arguments. This made possible newer and more powerful forms of philosophical discourse. The second part of this volume provides a reading of Buridan's philosophy, showing how this discourse shaped his treatment of speculative questions such as the relation between soul and body, the nature of knowledge, the proper subject of psychology, the function of the. (shrink)

It is a truism that the attitude of deference to the text plays a lesser role in Anglo-Saxon philosophy than in other philosophical traditions. Works of philosophy written in English have, it is true, spawned a massive secondary literature dealing with the ideas, problems or arguments they contain. But they have almost never given rise to works of commentary in the strict sense, a genre which is however a dominant literary form not only in the Confucian, Vedantic, Islamic, Jewish and (...) Scholastic traditions of the past, but also in relation to more recent German-language philosophy (thus for example in work on Hegel, Heidegger or Wittgenstein). Moreover Anglo-Saxon philosophers have themselves embraced the commentary form when dealing with Greek or Latin philosophers outside their own tradition. The paper seeks to establish the reasons for this imbalance by examining those factors which might be conducive to the growth of a commentary literature in a given culture. (shrink)

Boethius was a Roman senator who rose to high office under the Gothic king Theoderic the Great. He translated into Latin all he knew of Plato and Aristotle, and was profoundly interested in the issues of theology and philosophy. The Consolations were written while he awaited the execution of a tyrannical death sentence. The Consolations of Philosophy have been translated into English by King Alfred, Geoffrey Chaucer, and Queen Elizabeth I. This scholarly study by Henry Chadwick, the first this century (...) since the War, has stimulated new interest in these remarkable works. (shrink)

À plusieurs égards, il est vrai d’avancer que Maïmonide et Averroès poursuivent le même projet philosophique et religieux. D’autant plus que tous deux ont été décrits comme des disciples d’al-Fârâbî, le fondateur de l’école de l’aristotélisme arabe . Cependant, à première vue, leur oeuvre ne pouvait pas être moins ressemblante: Averroès n’a écrit presque exclusivement que des commentaires sur Aristote, cependant que Maïmonide n’est l’auteur d’aucune oeuvre qui appartienne à un genre philosophique dans le sens strict. Il est, d’un autre (...) côté, un commentateur distingué lui aussi - sauf qu’il n’explique pas Aristote, mais commente et met de l’ordre dans la Loi de Moïse. La question principale dont je traite dans cet article, est celle de savoir si ce rapport tellement différent à la philosophie et à l’exégèse chez Averroès et Maïmonide peut être compris comme deux façons d’implémenter le cadre conceptuel établi par al-Fârâbî. Je commence par examiner le projet d’al-Fârâbî, que j’essaie d’expliquer par deux objectifs: reprendre et continuer le projet de la philosophie antique et définir sa place dans une société, dans laquelle l’autorité de la Loi divine n’est pas mise en question. Ensuite, je montre que, tandis que l’oeuvre d’Averroès peut être comprise, dans l’ensemble, comme une continuation du projet d’al-Fârâbî, cela n’est pas vrai de la même façon pour l’oeuvre de Maïmonide qui en partie transforme al-Fârâbî de manière créative et en partie utilise des prémisses dont on ne trouvera pas la source en al-Fârâbî. La position de Maïmonide en ce qui concerne la philosophie et l’exégèse se distingue significativement de la position habituelle adoptée par les falâsifa, ce qui a eu des conséquences importantes pour la philosophie juive médiévale après Maïmonide. (shrink)

One of the most important texts for understanding the early work of Karl Barth.

INTRODUCTION The present volume is a study of the extant commentaries on a number of Plato's dialogues which were written by Neoplatonist philosophers of ...

Peter Lombard is best known as the author of a celebrated work entitled Book of Sentences, which for several centuries served as the standard theological textbook in the Christian West. It was the subject of more commentaries than any other work of Christian literature besides the Bible itself. The Book of Sentences is essentially a compilation of older sources, from the Scriptures and Augustine down to several of the Lombard's contemporaries, such as Hugh of Saint Victor and Peter Abelard. Its (...) importance lies in the Lombard's organisation of the theological material, his method of presentation, and the way in which he shaped doctrine in several major areas. Despite his importance, however, there is no accessible introduction to Peter Lombard's life and thought available in any modern language. This volume fills this considerable gap. Philipp W. Rosemann begins by demonstrating how the Book of Sentences grew out of a long tradition of Christian reflection-a tradition, ultimately rooted in Scripture, which by the twelfth century had become ready to transform itself into a theological system. Turning to the Sentences, Rosemann then offers a brief exposition of the Lombard's life and work. He proceeds to a book-by-book examination and interpretation of its main topics, including the nature and attributes of God, the Trinity, creation, angelology, human nature and the Fall, original sin, Christology, ethics, and the sacraments. He concludes by exploring how the Sentences helped shape the further development of the Christian tradition, from the twelfth century through the time of Martin Luther. (shrink)

The book documents thirty cases in which university-trained scholars were condemned for disseminating allegedly erroneous opinions in their teaching or writing.

Eileen C. Sweeney. gap between what faith believes and what reason understands, is also expressed in the attempt to think “that than which none greater can be thought.” For to think it is to reach God via a single, long extension of the mind ...

In earlier work, I have presented an interpretation of Obligationes as logical games of consistency maintenance; this interpretation has some advantages, in particular that of capturing the multi-agent, goal-oriented, rule-governed nature of the enterprise by means of the game analogy. But it has as its main limitation the fact that it does not provide a satisfactory account of the deontic aspect of the framework—i.e. of what being obliged to a certain statement consists in. In order to remedy this shortcoming, this (...) paper argues for the more encompassing thesis that Obligationes can be viewed as a theory of rational dialogical practices, in particular concerning the management of one's discursive commitments. The main inspiration for this interpretation comes from R. Brandom's inferentialist, normative pragmatism, but more generally, it relies heavily on a dialogical conception of logic. I argue that it offers a more compelling account of several aspects of the obligational framework, in particular the role of doubting responses and the ubiquity of obligational vocabulary in the context of scientific discourse in the medieval tradition. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 54, Issue 4, pp 335 - 355 Ian Rumfitt has recently drawn our attention to a couple of paradoxes of signification, claiming that although Thomas Bradwardine’s “multiple-meanings” account of truth and signification can solve the first of them, it cannot solve the second. The paradoxes of signification were in fact much discussed by Bradwardine’s successors in the fourteenth century. Bradwardine’s solution appears to turn on a distinction between the principal and the consequential signification of an utterance. However, (...) although such a distinction played an important role in his successors’ theories, it is shown that Bradwardine’s account of signification does not admit any such distinction, no part being prior to the others. Accordingly his solution, unlike those of his successors, does not fall prey to Rumfitt’s paradoxes. (shrink)

RésuméEst-il possible d'inventer une science qui définit les règles d'un débat éthique, logique et efficace? Shams al-Dīn al-Samarqandī, un logicien et juriste Ḥanafite, a jugé une telle entreprise possible. Il a assumé la tâche de développer une théorie générale de la discussion scientifique qui a eu un énorme succès dans les cercles d’études dans le monde musulman. Il a appelé la nouvelle discipline Ādāb al-baḥth wa-al-munāẓara, un ensemble de principes éthiques et logiques, empruntés à la logique aristotélicienne et à la (...) dialectique juridique musulmane. Son traité majeur, Risālat Ādāb al-baḥth, a initié une nouvelle discipline dans laquelle des douzaines de traités et de commentaires ont été rédigés. Dans cet article, il s'agit de mettre en lumière cette science négligée, de décrire sa structure, d'exposer ses fonctions et de souligner son importance pour le développement des débats et des dialogues intellectuels dans l'Islam médiéval tardif. (shrink)

Dissent and Philosophy in the Middle Ages offers scholars of Dante's Divine Comedy an integral understanding of the political, philosophical, and religious context of the medieval masterwork. First penned in French by Ernest L. Fortin, one of America's foremost thinkers in the fields of philosophy and theology, Dissidence et philosophie au moyen-âge brings to light the complexity of Dante's thought and art, and its relation to the central themes of Western civilization. Available in English for the first time through this (...) superb translation by Marc A. LePain, Dissent and Philosophy will make a supremely important contribution to the discussion of Dante as poet, theologian, and philosopher. (shrink)

The Cosmographia of Bernard Silvester was the most important literary myth written between Lucretius and Dante. One of the most widely read books of its time, it was known to authors whose interests were as diverse as those of Vincent of Beauvais, Dante, and Chaucer. Bernard offers one of the most profound versions of a familiar theme in medieval literature, that of man as a microcosm of the universe, with nature as the mediating element between God and the world. Brian (...) Stock's exposition includes many passages from the Cosmographia translated for the first time into English. Arising from the central analysis are several more general themes: among them the recreation by twelfth-century humanists of the languages of myth and science as handed down in the classical tradition; the creation of the world and of man, the chief mythical and cosmographical problem of the period; the development of naturalistic allegory; and Bernard's relation to the "new science" introduced from Greek and Arabic sources. Originally published in 1972. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

'Dialogue' was invented as a written form in democratic Athens and made a celebrated and popular literary and philosophical style by Plato. Yet it almost completely disappeared in the Christian empire of late antiquity. This book, the first general and systematic study of the genre in antiquity, asks: who wrote dialogues and why? Why did dialogue no longer attract writers in the later period in the same way? Investigating dialogue goes to the heart of the central issues of power, authority, (...) openness and playfulness in changing cultural contexts. This book analyses the relationship between literary form and cultural authority in a new and exciting way, and encourages closer reflection about the purpose of dialogue in its wider social, cultural and religious contexts in today's world. (shrink)

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. (shrink)

This book treats Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy as a work of imaginative literature, and applies modern techniques of criticism to his writings. The author's central purpose is to demonstrate the methodological and thematic coherence of The Consolation of Philosophy. Originally published in 1985. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in (...) durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

Commentaries on the Guide of the Perplexed occupy a central but neglected place in the history of Jewish thought. In the first study on the subject, Igor De Souza examines this dynamic tradition in its most creative period. Rather than mere interpretation, De Souza reads commentaries as texts in their own right. At the same time, he illustrates how texts are reimagined through commentary, and repurposed for new generations of readers.

In 1980 L. M. de Rijk edited some texts connected with medieval disputation ( Die mittelaterlichen Traktate De modo opponendi et respondendi ), towards which he showed a strikingly contemptuous attitude. The reason for his contempt was that the treatises did not fit the obligationes and sophismata tradition. In this article I focus on the original version, the Thesaurus Philosophorum , to highlight the distinction of this family of treatises with respect to the “modern“ tradition. First, I study the features (...) of the disputation that can be recognised through the collection of fallacious arguments contained in the Thesaurus . Second, I briefly examine the contents of the treatise and their arrangement, showing that they are closely related to the kind of disputation in question. I hope to support the idea that neither the technique of disputation nor the contents and their arrangement deserve a straightforward rejection. (shrink)

This interdisciplinary study offers an interpretation of the major logical, philosophical/theological and poetic writings of Boethius, Abelard and Alan of Lille. The author examines their theories of language and the ways in which they explore how words illuminate things, how the mind comprehends God and how the individual reaches beatitude.

The fourteenth-century English philosopher and theologian Richard Kilvington presents a useful correction to popular views of medieval philosophy in two ways. On the one hand, he reminds us that to think of medieval philosophy in terms of Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Ockham, or to think of medieval logic in terms of Aristotelian syllogistic, is to overlook vast areas of intellectual endeavour. Kilvington, like many before and after him, was deeply concerned with problems that would now be assigned to philosophy of (...) language; philosophical logic and philosophy of science. He discussed topics in epistemic logic, semantic paradoxes, problems of reference, particularly those connected with the interplay between quantifiers and modal or temporal operators, and problems arising from the use of infinite series in the analysis of motion and change. On the other hand, this very account of his work raises the important issue of conceptual domain. I have spoken as if Kilvington's work can be neatly classified in terms of contemporary interests; and the temptation to read medieval philosophy in modern terms is only strengthened when one recognizes Kilvington as the first member of the group of Oxford calculatores, men such as William Heytesbury and Richard Swineshead, whose discussions of mathematics and physics have caused them to be hailed as forerunners of modern science. (shrink)

This book presents the very latest research on the medieval use of sophisms in logical and grammatical investigation by twenty-three of the leading experts in Europe and beyond. Important insights into the genre of sophismatic treatises have been gained only very recently, and the organisation of the European Symposium on this topic in 1990 led to a concentration of research and evaluation of insights. The papers are divided into three groups: one covers textual study and analysis of the role of (...) sophisms in the medieval curriculum; another deals with grammatical sophisms; and the third covers particular logical sophisms, from 'Man is the worthiest of creatures' and problems in the theory of reference to the Liar paradox and the work of William of Ockham. (shrink)

Investigates the intent, method and structural unity of Thomas Aquinas's Summa Contra Gentiles. The author of this study argues that the intended audience is Christian and that the subject is Christian wisdom.

This review article of the volume Nach der Verurteilung von 1277. Philosophie und Theologie an der Universität von Paris im letzen Viertel des 13. Jahrhunderts. Studien und Texte, edited by J.A. Aertsen, K. Emery and A. Speer focuses on three points. First of all, it discusses new developments in the field of enquiry concerning the origin, the meaning and the influence of the condemnation of 1277. Then, it highlights the crisis of the historiographical categories introduced by scholars of the first (...) half of the twentieth century to interpret the condemnation and its aftermath. Lastly, it questions whether a new ‘standard interpretation’ of the condemnation does indeed exist, as Emery and Speer claim in their Introduction, arguing that the supposed ‘founders’ of such an interpretation do not share any kind of old-fashioned positivist approach to medieval thought. In fact, their works simply stress how the emergence of a class of professional philosophers brought about a new conception of the nature and scope of philosophy, considered as an autonomous discipline that could be appreciated and practiced for its own sake. (shrink)

ONE OF THE IDEAS TO WHICH LEO STRAUSS drew the attention of many readers in the last century is that of a difference between exoteric and esoteric philosophical writing. These terms can refer to different kinds of philosophical teaching, one kind intended for a general and the other kind for a more restricted audience. Indeed, it seems to be the case historically that it was Aristotle who first used one of the terms in such a sense, as will be discussed (...) below. (shrink)

Ramon Llull hat das größte mittelalterliche Korpus von literarischen Dialogen in der Romania hinterlassen. Es steht im lateinischen, romanischen und arabischen Kontext der theologisch-philosophischen Diskussion. Die Arbeit untersucht sechs der 26 Dialoge Llulls eingehender im Hinblick auf ihre ideologische Ausrichtung und die literarischen Verfahren, die diese im Dialog transportieren. Llull entwickelt dabei bestimmte mittelalterliche Dialogtraditionen zu einem eigenen Modell weiter, das eine iberoromanische Linie lullistischer Dialoge begründet. Die Arbeit enthält die Erstedition der »Consolatio Venetorum«.

"This is the first book to deal with the writing of literary and philosophical dialogues in Greek from the Roman empire to the end of Byzantium and beyond. Arranged in chronological order, 16 case studies combining theoretical approaches and in-depth analysis introduce a wide array of such dialogues, including consideration of the neighbouring Syriac, Georgian, and Armenian, as well as Latin traditions"--Provided by publisher.