Given the enduring importance of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, it is remarkable to find that there is no extensive surviving commentary on this text from the period between the second century and the twelfth century. This volume is focused on the first of the medieval commentaries, that produced in the early twelfth century by Eustratios of Nicaea, Michael of Ephesus, and an anonymous author in Constantinople. This endeavor was to have a significant impact on the reception of the Nicomachean Ethics in Latin and Catholic Europe. For, in the mid-thirteenth century, Robert...

Transcendental unity is a figure of thought of the Latin Middle Ages, which is indebted to Avicenna's renewal of metaphysics and which is wrongly attributed to Aristotle. A specific interpretation of the demonstrable attribute determines the metaphysical reflection on 'the one' and turns it into a transcendental attribute of being. Notwithstanding the variety of epistemic constellations, however, this metaphysical relationship of being and unity always turns out to be a fundamental state of affairs. Transcendental unity identifies as a problem constellation, the principles of which are still...

This book is a gift to Stephen Brown in honor of his 75th birthday. The 35 contributions to this Festschrift are disposed in five parts: Metaphysics and Natural Philosophy, Epistemology and Ethics, Philosophy and Theology, Theological Questions, Text and Context. These five headings articulate Stephen Brown's underlying conception and understanding of medieval philosophy and theology, which the editors share: The main theoretical and practical issues of the 'long medieval' intellectual tradition are rooted in an epistemology and a metaphysics, which must be understood not as separated from...

In his Sentences Commentary (published ca. 1320), the Carmelite John Baconthorp discusses the question of whether beatitude is a reflexive act. He refers to John of Paris's view in which beatitude is an act of knowing that we possess God and Durandus of St. Pourcain's view that it is knowing that we know God. The object of the first is God as possessed (Deus ut tentus) and the second is God as known (Deus ut visus). Taking Baconthorp's account as a starting point, the present study adopts a threefold approach: First it analyzes Baconthorp's text on its own terms. Next it reconstructs...

The origin of transcendental thought is not to be sought in Kant's philosophy but is a medieval achievement. This book provides for the first time a complete history of the doctrine of the transcendentals, from its beginning in the "Summa de bono" of Philip the Chancellor (ca. 1225) up to its most extensive systematic account in the "Metaphysical Disputations" of Francisco Suarez (1597). The book also shows the importance of the doctrine for the understanding of philosophy in the Middle Ages. Metaphysics is called "First Philosophy," not because it deals with the first, divine being, but...

This book traces the rise and decline of two rival intellectual traditions in later-medieval trinitarian theology, one of them predominantly Franciscan, the other predominantly Dominican. Disagreeing about the way to understand the identification in John's Gospel of the second person of the Trinity, the Son, with the Word, the two traditions clashed over the issues of concepts and concept formation, the category of relation, counterfactual logic, and the use of authority. Considering more than seventy theologians from the period, the book presents an overview of the debate, while also...

Among the commentaries on Aristotle's Physics produced by medieval masters in the 14th Century Oresme's is one of the most interesting. The main problems of natural philosophy (motion, time, intension and remission of forms) as well as cognitive and ontological issues are widely discussed. Oresme proposes original solutions to most of these topics, based on an original view concerning the relationship between substance and its properties (condicio/condiciones, modi rerum); Oresme's solutions are always associated with sharp criticism of the two main philosophical schools: the...

The history of skepticism usually ignores the Middle Ages. It is customary in most historical overviews to say that epistemological skepticism and external-world skepticism did not find its way into the Western philosophical tradition until Sextus Empiricus was rediscovered and retranslated into Latin in the Sixteenth century. It is the aim of this book to show that this is not true and that the history of skepticism must be rewritten. It is only once the rich discussions of both epistemological and external-world skepticism in the Middle Ages are included that the whole history of skepticism...

The Questiones libri Porphirii is a commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge by the fourteenth-century logician Thomas Manlevelt. It is edited here in full. Not much is known of Thomas Manlevelt, but his work is remarkable enough. Following in the footsteps of William of Ockham, Manlevelt stresses the individual nature of all things existing in the outside world. He radically challenges our conceptional framework. He applies Ockham's razor in a ruthless manner to do away with all entities not deemed necessary for preservation. In the end, Manlevelt even maintains that substance does not...

In William Ockham on Metaphysics, Jenny Pelletier offers an account of Ockham's concept of metaphysics as it emerges throughout his philosophical and theological work. She argues that Ockham (c. 1287-1347) believed metaphysics to be a fruitful branch of philosophy and gives a preliminary description of its distinctive subject-matter. Metaphysics is the science that studies all beings and their most general properties. Ockham was considered by some to be profoundly skeptical of metaphysics. Recent scholarship tends to focus on regional metaphysical issues (e.g. universals, relations),...