The contributors to this volume are noted scholars from Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Hungary, Morocco, Poland, the Soviet Union, and Spain. Each has stepped somewhat outside of his or her usual academic interest to consider how the writings of a particular Arab philosopher or of a group of Arab philosophers were introduced into a particular European university. Their essays identify the European professor or scholar who first introduced the works of an Arab philosopher into his university, speak about the works themselves, and explore what prompted the original European interest...

This volume contains the first critical edition and a complete English translation of the well-known correspondence conducted by the fourteenth-century 'sceptic' author, Nicholas of Autrecourt, with Bernard of Arezzo and a Master Giles. In the Introduction the extant manuscripts are analysed and the different positions of Nicholas, Bernard and Giles are discussed; the purport of Giles' reply to Nicholas is, contrary to common opinion, identified as a defence of Aristotelianism rather than of Bernard's 'sceptic' views. Two appendices contain the first critical edition of the records of the...

This book sets out to examine the medieval understanding of Aristotle's famous discussion of "weakness of the will" (akrasia, incontinentia) in the seventh book of his Nicomachean Ethics. The medieval views are outlined primarily on the basis of the commentaries on Aristotle's Ethics by Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Walter Burley, Gerald Odonis and John Buridan. An investigation of the earlier Augustinian discussion concerning reluctant actions (invitus facere) rounds out the study. The recent studies of weakness of the will have neglected the medieval...

This volume deals with the "discovery of nature" in the 12th century, focusing on its epistemological consequences for the speculative understanding of nature. A symbolic understanding is gradually replaced by an original interest, guided by reason alone, in the structure, constitution and process of the physical world. The growing knowledge of the "natural world" - which took the form of a systematic knowledge of causes - parallels attempts to establish a coherent "scientia naturalis." The main protagonists of the so-called "School of Chartres" characterize the goal of this "philosophia...

Participation and Substantiality in Thomas Aquinas presents a comprehensive and penetrating account of Aquinas' metaphysics of creation. Its main focus is the concept of participation of being. On the basis of a detailed textual analysis a philosophical interpretation is offered of the main concepts and arguments which underlie Thomas' theocentric understanding of reality. The central unifying theme of the book is the apparent tension between the notion of participation (central to the Platonic tradition) and that of substance (central to the Aristotelian tradition). The author argues...

This study challenges the current view that the originality of Duns Scotus' notion of contingent causality lies in modal logic. It works as an ontological concept, and so provides a point of entry into the foundations of Duns Scotus' metaphysics.
As one of two basic manifestations of the active causal power of being, it points to Scotus' underlying ontology, which can no longer be seen as a failure to attain Aquinas' clarity. We have a positive alternative, capable of generating the characteristic Scotist theses: univocity of being, formal distinction, haecceitas, proof of God's existence...

The Vatican Library's Vaticanus Latinus collection is one of its largest holdings. The majority of the codices between the shelf numbers 3000 and 9000 remain as yet to be cataloged according to modern standards. Professor Girard Etzkorn has cataloged over one hundred of these manuscripts, selecting principally those pertaining to Franciscan authors and Franciscan history between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries. He has successfully identified the authors of many treatises and sometimes entire works which were hitherto 'anonymous'. While the Iter Vaticanum Franciscanum...

The study provides a reappraisal of the controversy over the value of logic in theology in the eleventh century, which has for a long time been a theme central to the historiography of early medieval thought.
In the four chapters of the work the author gives close exegesis of the central texts by Peter Damian, Lanfranc of Bec, Berengar of Tours and Anselm of Canterbury respectively and argues that the familiar ways of describing the theme are thoroughly misleading. Damian's 'anti-dialectical' attitude is less extreme than often claimed. Lanfranc's reputation as a dialectician is largely...

This volume contains the first critical edition of Girald Odonis (d. 1349), De intentionibus, in which the author deals with the multifarious problems around conceptualization with which philosophers and theologians from around 1300 were faced when attempting to bridge the gap between thought and reality. Girald appears to have been an unyielding defender of the 'realistic' position, holding that our variously articulated concepts (intentiones) are representative of as many distinctions in Reality. The main target of his severe criticism upon contemporaneous views of the matter...