Spinoza in English is the first bibliography to bring together the entire 325-year record of books, monographs, dissertations, and articles in English on Benedict de Spinoza (1632-1677), including translations of his works into English. Well over 2100 citations are presented, bringing this record through early 1991. Arranged alphabetically by author or editor and internally cross-referenced for ease of use, this bibliography also cites its own sources where appropriate and, in many cases, provides guidance on how to obtain unpublished or out-of- print titles. Additionally, it restores...

The book is an analysis of the cultural and social functions of law, legal processes and legal rituals in late medieval Northern France.
It is centered around a time and a place in which European law underwent some major transformations, from a plethora of local oral customs to a fairly coherent system of national, written customary law. In this process, law and legal procedures came to reflect a great variety of cultural traditions, ranging from popular perceptions of animals and the human body to learned ideas of Roman jurisprudence.
Drawing upon wide-ranging sources: judicial, legal,...

This volume deals with scepticism and irreligion in the 17th and 18th century. The various contributions seek to clarify and to understand the challenges made then to both the framework of thinking about God and religion and the intellectual systems that had supported religious thinking. Ample attention is given to early modern interpretations of ancient Pyrrhonism and also to biblical criticism. Contributors include: Susanna Akerman, Silvia Berti, Constance Blackwell, Olivier Bloch, Harry M. Bracken, James E. Force, Alan Gabbey, Sarah Hutton, David S. Katz, Alan Charles Kors, Lothar...

The Latitudinarians, a group of prominent clergymen in the late seventeenth-century Church of England, were articulate opponents of Anglicanism's intellectual foes. Against the challenges of Hobbism, Spinozism, Deism, scepticism, and Roman Catholicism, they presented a body of thought emphasizing reason in religion and practical morality over credal speculation. Their theology was designed to combat 'practical atheism' and their sermons stressed that the chief design of Christianity was 'to make men good.' They advocated an alliance of religion and science, and were early participants in the...

The author shows how the history of the classical tradition in Russia cannot be separated from the history of Russia's orientation to Western Europe in general. His book, based on many little-known and previously unexplored Russian materials, is the result of the first comprehensive research on the study of the Greek and Roman classics in Russia, and its sociocultural --utopian as well as ideological-- function within the framework of Russian cultural and intellectual history and Russian educational policy from the accession of Peter the Great to the death of Nicholas I. A tradition does not...

One of the burning issues of late medieval and early Renaissance Italy was the question of language. The single most important figure to treat this subject in the late Middle Ages was Dante Alighieri. The Dantean argument on language with its implicit acknowledgment of a classical bilingualism and its faith in the efficacy of the vernacular stimulated and defined the debate on language among the humanists of the 15th century. This book aims at a novel and open-ended reading of Dante's literature on language and at a systematic reconstruction of the whole body of humanistic literature on...

The first general study of Peter Lombard (c. 1100-1160) in a century, this book places Peter's thought in the context of the intellectual debates of his time in the effort to understand the substance of Lombardian theology and the reasons why his principal work, the Sentences, immediately became a classic of early scholastic theology with a durable influence, doing more to shape the education of university theologians and philosophers than any other work of systematic theology for the next four centuries. Attention is paid to the sentence collection as a genre of theological...

This book presents a new interpretation of the two most innovative renaissance works on the use of language, Lorenzo Valla's Repastinatio dialecticae et philosophiae (1439) and Rudolph Agricola's De inventione dialectica (1479). Mack attempts to find a path through the controversies which have recently raged around Valla's work, acknowledging the originality and skill of his attack on Aristotelian logic metaphysics, but recognizing the inconsistency (and even the Aristotelianism) of his alternative system. Mack provides the first full commentary on Agricola's work in modern...

This study examines the history of a fundamental problem in Aristotelian cognitive psychology, i.e. the nature and function of the mechanisms that provide the human mind with data concerning physical reality.
Chapter I traces the Classical and Arabic prehistory of the Medieval doctrine of intelligible species. Scholastic discussions on formal mediation in intellective cognition were constrained in essential ways by Thomas. Chapter II analyzes his views on mental representation in the context of the reception of Peripatetic psychology in the West. The following chapters (III-V) examine the...

The medieval concern with Arabic is well established. There was, however, a 'second wave' of Arabic interest in seventeenth-century Europe, which is not widely known. The essays in this volume reveal that, contrary to all expectation, the study of Arabic was pursued by a circle of natural philosophers, philologists and theologians in England in close contact with those on the Continent. Arabic was defended as an aid to biblical exegesis and as the key to a 'treasure house' of ancient knowledge. It led to the founding of Arabic chairs at Oxford and Cambridge Universities, endowed by...