When William of Ockham lectured on Lombard's "Sentences" in 1317-1319, he articulated a new theory of knowledge. Its reception by fourteenth-century scholars was, however, largely negative, for it conflicted with technical accounts of vision and with their interprations of Duns Scotus. This study begins with Roger Bacon, a major source for later scholastics' efforts to tie a complex of semantic and optical explanations together into an account of concept formation, truth and the acquisition of certitude. After considering the challenges of Peter Olivi and Henry of Ghent, Part I concludes with...

The reception of the Aristotelian Organon in the Arabic and Latin Middle Ages sparked a lively debate about the problematic relationship between logic and theology. On the one hand, theology faced new logical theories and methods of argumentation; on the other hand, logic was to provide explanatory models and techniques for the analysis of theological problems. The contributions in this volume discuss this twofold challenge on the basis of key texts and authors, ranging from early Islamic theology to the Christian later Middle Ages. The volume includes contributions by Cornelia Schock,...

One of Thomas Aquinas's central ideas is his attempt to show how it is possible to speak about the incomprehensible God. To reach a better understanding of this project, it is necessary to gain some insight into how he used the theories he acquired during his time in the faculty of arts in his philosophical-theological works. Park's book deals with the question which, despite the current flourishing of the studies of the medieval philosophy of language, has not received much attention. The application of the theories of signification and supposition as well as the doctrine of the modi...

This volume examines a selection of late medieval works devoted to the intensive infinite in order to draw a comprehensive picture of the context, character and importance of scholastic efforts to reason philosophically about divine infinity. As Dominican masters face Franciscan 'spirituals' and as university-trained theologians face evangelical laymen, the purpose and meaning of divine infinity shift, reflecting a basic tension between the Church's Petrine vocation for geopolitical orthodoxy and its more Pauline mission to promote Christian orthopraxis. The first part of the book traces the...

This volume deals with the reception of Aristotle's natural philosophy in Oxford between 1250 and 1270. It examines a group of ten unedited commentaries on Aristotle's Physics.
This book consists of four main chapters devoted respectively to the concepts of motion, infinity, place, and time. Topics included are the question about the nature of motion, the discussion of the actual infinity in numbers, the relation between Aristotle's concepts of place in the Physics and in the Categories, the debate about the reality and the unicity of time.
This book offers a comprehensive philosophical...

This volume examines the changing perceptions of time in the transition from the medieval debate to early modern philosophy. Some of the foremost contemporary experts try to weave the various strands of the topic into a methodological and doctrinal whole. The book consists of 21 studies (19 in English, 2 in French) subdivided into five main sections, entitled respectively The Late Antique Legacy, The Scholastic Debate, Late Scholasticism, Time and Medicine, Early Modern Philosophy. Themes discussed include the reception of Aristotle's doctrine of time, the...

This volume analyses ancient and medieval theories of intentionality in various contexts: perception, imagination, and intellectual thinking. It sheds new light on classical theories (e.g. by Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas) and examines neglected sources, both Greek and Latin. It includes contributions by J. Biard, M. Burnyeat, V. Caston, D. Frede, R. Gaskin, E. Karger, C. Michon, D. O'Meara, C. Panaccio, R. Pasnau, D. Perler, Ch. Rapp, P. Simons, R. Sorabji, and H. Weidemann.

This study of Anselm of Canterbury's enigmatic work De grammatico provides a perspective both on Anselm's thought and the history of medieval dialectic immediately prior to the renaissance of dialectic in the 12th century. The first part of the book examines Anselm's notion of dialectic and illustrates the role of De grammatico in the context of teaching dialectic. The second part of the book remarks the novelty of Anselm's way of treating fallacies and presents a full study of the technique for treating fallacies, its theoretical basis, and its application in the context of...

The last 30 years have seen a revived interest in Henry of Ghent, one of the leading theologians at the University of Paris in the last quarter of the 13th century. This volume offers a new and comprehensive study of a central aspect of Henry's philosophical thought: his understanding of metaphysics. The study examines why, according to Henry, there has to be a science investigating being qua being and how such an inquiry is at all possible. In Henry's conception, metaphysics is not just one scientific discipline among others but the first and fundamental one for it deals with the first...

Ramon Llull (ca. 1232-1316), mystic, missionary, philosopher, lay theologian, and one of the founding fathers of Catalan literature, was chiefly known in his own time and in subsequent generations as the inventor of a combinatorial, semi-mechanical method of demonstration, which he called his 'Art' and which he had developed to free interreligious debate from its fruitless textual base. Most of the extensive modern literature has been dedicated to mapping the foundations of Llull's system, with little attempt to see how he used and combined these foundations to produce actual demonstrations....