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...

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...