This volume gathers studies by prominent scholars and philosophers about the question: how have major figures from the history of philosophy, and some contemporary philosophers, addressed the ultimate why question: why is there anything at all rather than nothing whatsoever? The authors take this question seriously, striving to go beyond accounting for the present state of reality as distinguished from a prior or subsequent state, to the more profound question of discerning why anything whatsoever exists.

This volume contains eleven articles and book chapters written by John Wippel since the publication of his Metaphysical Themes in Thomas Aquinas in 1984. Many of them have also been published since the completion of his The Metaphysical Thought of Thomas Aquinas: From Finite Being to Uncreated Being. It is intended to serve as a complement to but not as a substitute for those volumes.
The essays considered in this volume range widely over many different topics such as the possibility of a Christian philosophy from a Thomistic perspective, the Latin Avicenna as a source for Aquinas's...

The story of the emergence of German Idealism has never been fully told. In this volume, an international group of leading scholars shows how the various aspirations at work in the emergence of German Idealism - moral, religious, aesthetic, political, and epistemological - can be understood as both consummating and overcoming Kant's critical philosophy.

Offers a comprehensive philosophical study of Confucian ethics - its basic insights and its relevance to contemporary Western moral philosophy. Writer and philosopher A.S. Cua presents fourteen essays which deal with various problems arising in the philosophical explication of the nature of Chinese ethical thought.

This study of the questions of final causality is arranged in historical order from Aristotle to contemporary anthropic-principle cosmology. It discusses such teleological issues as chance and providence, and Aristotle's definition of nature in relation to extrinsic efficient and final causes.

Presents 15 studies occasioned by the 500th anniversary of the European discovery of America. It covers both the initial encounters between the Europeans and native Americans and the golden age of Hispanic philosophy that followed the discovery - specifically between 1500 and 1650.

The ten essays in this collection approach the philosophy of Thomas Aquinas not merely as an object of scholarly interest but also as a framework for addressing perennial philosophical questions, even as they are raised and debated in our own times.

Consisting of nine studies, this volume presents a series of specific insights on Aristotle's influence from Plotinus through Arabic thought.

Provides commentary on prominent philosophers on important philosophical themes. "These unusual and exquisite essays focus on a problem or a text with extraordinary acuity".