The seventeenth century was a period of dramatic change in the field of philosophy. In logic, traditional Aristotelian textbooks were transformed by the emergence of an alternative 'logic of ideas'. This new logic was developed by Descartes and Locke, its main representatives, and by Arnauld and Malebranche. The present study starts with a fresh and detailed analysis of the logic of ideas. The author then puts the fruitfulness of his characterization of the new logic to the test, by studying its reception in the eclectic intellectual environment of the Dutch Republic between 1690 and 1750....

This book deals with one of the main themes in the life and thinking of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), the experience of conflict and the need to realise reconciliation and tolerance. The essays in this volume are discussing not only the various conflicts in which this important philosopher, theologian, mathematician and politician of the 15th century was involved, but also try to interpret the main speculative themes in his philosophical and theological works in the perspective of his historical experiences. As such, the book also delivers a contribution to a better understanding of...

This book presents a study of twelfth-century humanism seen as an all-embracing discourse in which the human and the divine interact on equal terms. The book focuses on a number of twelfth-century intellectuals, especially Thierry of Chartres, Peter Abelard, William of Conches, Bernard Silvestris, and Alan of Lille. Defining characteristic of their texts is the fact that God, nature and humanity enter into a trialogue of sorts involving many disparate subjects and aiming to bring out the archetypal relatedness of all kinds of knowledge with respect to human nature. As the authors studied here...

This book deals with the history of a central problem in the philosophy of time: Can time exist without mind or consciousness, and if not, in what respects? Aristotle was the first to formulate this problem, and it has been intensively discussed ever since. This book analyses the answers and arguments and sets them in their historical context. Although there have been very different approaches, the book shows important continuities as well.
Besides being a specialist monograph, it can be used in courses on the philosophy of time in general, or on the realism/idealism debate.

Much of the previous fifty years of scholarship on Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758) has circumscribed his ethical thought either within narrow interpretations of Calvinist theology or the philosophy of the "moral sense." The mutually exclusive nature of each perspective has distorted the importance Edwards granted human abilities in the salvation process and the demanding moral standards he thought were uniquely defining of Christians. Building on new interest in Protestant scholasticism, Puritan "precisionism," and virtue ethics, Virtue Reformed recalibrates the scholarly stalemate with a...

This volume analyses the renewal of Western moral thought in the twelfth century. This renewal was marked by a burgeoning of increasingly systematized texts, a lively reception of ancient moral philosophy and a greater emphasis on the psychology of the moral agent. Five contributions are devoted to monastic morality (Anselm of Canterbury, Bernard of Clairvaux, Hugh of Folieto, Hugh of Saint Victor, Peter Abelard); another five to (proto-)scholastic thought (John of Salisbury, Peter Abelard, Stephen Langton, the idea of natural virtue, the justification of lying); three discuss moral issues in...

The book explores the philosophical thinking of Petrarch and Boccaccio in contrast to the writings of contemporary mendicants. Examining both Latin and vernacular works, it investigates how these humanists poetically express the temporal, subjective, and emotional quality of moral sensibility, in a way that shifts to the reader the weight of discerning the ethical message. The book centers its analysis on a series of paradoxes pondered by these humanists: the self that changes yet persists over time; the awareness of self-deception; the individual's validation of authority; and the ethics of...

Socinianism has often been studied in national contexts and apart from other currents like Arminianism. This volume is especially interested in the "in-betweens" the relationship of Anti-trinitarianism to "liberal" currents in reformed Protestantism, namely Dutch Remonstrants, English Latitudinarians and some French Huguenots. This in-between also has a local aspect: the volume studies the transformations that Anti-trinitarianism experienced in the complicated transition from its origins in Italy and its refuge in Poland, Moravia and Transsylvania to Prussia, to the Netherlands and later to...

In ten chapters, partly case-studies, this monograph analyzes the (new) ways in which cultural manifestations were used to create the necessary preconditions for (religious) policy and power in the Rome of Urban VIII (1623-1644). It was the intensified interaction between culture and power-politics that created what we now call 'the Baroque'. Based on a rich variety of, hitherto largely unexplored, primary sources, the book addresses the basic issues of papal power in the post-Tridentine period. It does not study actual papal politics, but rather the cultural forms that were essential to the...

This volume comprises original contributions from 17 scholars whose work and careers Ronald Witt has touched in myriad ways. Intellectual, social, and political historians, a historian of philosophy and an art historian: specialists in various temporal and geographical regions of the Renaissance world here address specific topics reflecting some of the major themes that have woven their way through Ronald Witt's intellectual cursus. While some essays offer fresh readings of canonical texts and explore previously unnoticed lines of filiation among them, others present "discoveries,"...