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 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 deals with the Dominicans at Oxford University from 1300-1350. It describes the history of the Oxford friary, who the friars were, who were there, how they were chosen and the intellectual life they created. It develops the idea of the friary as a "conversational community." The theology of four friars is dealt with in depth: Hugh of Lawton, Arnold of Strelley, William Crathorn and Robert Holcot, relying often on unedited manuscript sources. The focus is on their response to the modal theory of Duns Scotus and Ockham. Discussions of necessity, contingency, divine foreknowledge, a...

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....

The history of modern metaphysics is essentially marked by its splitting up into a metaphysica generalis and a metaphysica specialis, a well-known distinction especially within Christian Wolff's systematic conception of metaphysics. This study investigates the actual origins of this significant development, which can be already found at the beginning of the 14th century. On the basis of a fundamentally revised doctrine of transcendentals the Franciscan theologian Francis of Marchia ( 1290-1344) introduces for the first time a dissociation of the primum cognitum of the...

The question of how pure spiritual beings like angels communicate had already been discussed by the Church Fathers. How could an angelic speech-act take place, if it does not follow the laws of ordinary language? The scholastic philosophers conducted an extensive and rather controversial debate about the language of angels ('locutio angelica'), which covered pragmatics, aspects of the 'Language of Mind' and the theory of truth and meaning. This debate was already very complex in the Middle Ages, but in Jesuit circles (and in Baroque Scholasticism more generally), discussions of angelic...

Long thought to be the most important medieval philosopher and theologian after Scotus and the founder of late medieval Nominalism, the meaning and influence of William of Ockham's thought have become matters of intense debate in recent years. After a survey of the changing assessment of Nominalism in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and a new understanding of twelfth-century Nominalism with related elements in the thought of Augustine and Anselm, this book examines the reception of Ockham's thought at Oxford and Paris, the crisis over Ockhamism at Paris in the 1335 to 1345 period, and...

This collection of essays, papers originally delivered at conferences in Bonn and Boston, show in a detailed way the tone and nature of philosophical and theological issues and arguments at the University of Paris in the early fourteenth century. They touch on a large number of authors and a broad spectrum of subjects and present these discussions with regard to the intellectual framework set by the earlier Parisian generation of Thomas Aquinas, Henry of Ghent and Godfrey of Fontaine. It becomes evident that the principal contributors to the new intellectual energy in early fourteenth-century...