Few works have shaped a national literature as thoroughly as the Poem of the Cid has shaped the Spanish literary tradition. Tracing the life of the eleventh-century military commander Rodrigo Diaz de Vivar, called El Cid (from the Arabic Sayyidi, "My Lord"), this medieval epic describes a series of events surrounding his exile. The text of the poem survives in only one early-thirteenth-century manuscript copied by a single scribe, yet centuries later the figure of the Cid still was celebrated in the Spanish popular ballad tradition. Today almost every theme that characterizes Spanish...

The central argument of this book is that the traditional notion of Natural Law has almost disappeared from the ethical and moral discourse of our time. For Thomas Aquinas, the author whose conception of Natural Law forms the foundation for the book, the ontological and ethical orders are not autonomous but inseparable-in effect, his ethical system is an "ontological morality." For Thomas, the ethical (practical wisdom) must be understood as an extension of the metaphysical (speculative wisdom). Most modern philosophers, by contrast, consider these two orders to be entirely separate. Here...

The central claim of this book is that Philo of Alexandria's philosophical method served as the model for the philosophical works of Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas. Moses Maimonides and Thomas Aquinas stand as two pillars in the history of religious philosophy. In their respective religious communities each philosopher is considered the great master who expressed the doctrine of the religious tradition in philosophical terms. One of the most important points established in this book is that both of these thinkers inherited a set of standard philosophical topics (divine attributes,...