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61 results in Medieval philosophy

Page 1 of 4

Ockham's ‘Summa Logicae'
  • A Critical Guide
  • Edited by Claude Panaccio, Jenny Pelletier
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • William of Ockham's Summa Logicae (The Sum of Logic), composed in the mid-1320s, is a major work in the history of Western philosophy. It was highly influential for several centuries following its appearance. Ostensibly a textbook on logic, the work is an essential resource for understanding Ockham's philosophical project at large and contains numerous innovative ideas about thought, language, and ontology that are now attracting much interest in contemporary philosophy. Despite an abundant growth in Ockham scholarship in recent decades, this Critical Guide is the first collection of essays to be devoted to the Summa Logicae. The volume covers a wide range of topics, including nominalism, metalanguage, modes of signifying, Ockham's theory of the categorical syllogism, and modal logic. It provides both fresh perspectives on existing debates and new contributions on topics that have not yet entered mainstream scholarship on Ockham.

Aquinas and the Ethics of Happiness
  • Joseph Stenberg
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    July 2025
    Print publication:
    31 July 2025
  • Aquinas sees the key elements of his ethics – happiness, law, virtue, and grace – as an interconnected whole. However, he seldom steps back to help his reader see how they actually fit together. In this book, Joseph Stenberg reconsiders the most fundamental ways in which Aquinas connects these major elements of his ethics. Stenberg presents a novel reading of Aquinas's account of individual happiness that is historically sound and philosophically interesting, according to which happiness is exclusively a matter of engaging in and enjoying genuinely good activities. He builds on that reading to offer an account of common happiness. He then shows that Aquinas defends a unique form of eudaimonism, Holistic Eudaimonism, which puts common happiness rather than individual happiness at the very heart of ethics, including at the heart of law, virtue, and grace. His book will appeal to anyone with an interest in Aquinas or the history of ethics.

Reading Aquinas's Five Ways
  • The Arguments for God in Summa Theologiae
  • Peter Weigel
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    June 2025
    Print publication:
    30 June 2025
  • Thomas Aquinas's famous five arguments for God's existence, or 'Five Ways,' in Summa theologiae Ia q.2 a.3 are a cornerstone of thought and discussion about God and are still much debated today. In this book Peter Weigel provides the philosophical background, particularly surrounding Aquinas's metaphysics and theory of causation, needed to understand the Five Ways and examines the thinking behind the premises of these often difficult arguments. Weigel also considers larger issues surrounding arguing for God's existence beyond Aquinas's views, including more recent philosophical and scientific developments. He introduces readers to a wide array of thinkers and positions on the issues surrounding arguments for God, considers objections and other views from numerous historical and contemporary sources, and contemplates how Aquinas might respond to them. Written in clear prose with full explanations of technical concepts, his book will benefit a wide range of readers from undergraduates to advanced scholars.

Medieval Philosophical Writings on the Powers of the Soul
  • From Aquinas to Ockham
  • Edited and translated by Russell L. Friedman, Can Laurens Löwe
  • Coming soon
  • Expected online publication date:
    April 2025
    Print publication:
    17 April 2025
  • Philosophers of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries held that organisms are alive by virtue of possessing a soul, and that the soul endows an organism with various powers. This volume presents a rich selection of key medieval Aristotelian texts on the relation between the soul and its powers, most of them previously untranslated and written by thinkers whose accounts of the soul and its powers are not well known. Each text can be seen as part of a lively medieval debate, responding to or criticizing another text also found in the volume. An introduction situates this debate in its broader medieval context, and the detailed explanatory notes and glossary of terms and arguments make the texts accessible to a wide range of readers including non-experts. The result is a valuable resource for understanding how Aristotle's theory of the soul and its powers was received and transformed in the Middle Ages.

Bonaventure's 'Journey of the Soul into God'
  • Context and Commentary
  • Randall Smith
  • Published online:
    23 November 2024
    Print publication:
    28 November 2024
  • Saint Bonaventure's Journey of the Soul into God is one of the most important works in the Christian mystical tradition. Highly regarded for it clarity, rational  organization, and subtle insights, it is also one of the key theological treatises of the high Middle Ages. In this volume, Randall Smith provides the first comprehensive commentary in English of Bonaventure's classic text. He situates the work within its historical, intellectual, and cultural contexts, showing how a consideration of Bonaventure's sources helps us appreciate his text. Smith also provides an extended analysis not only of the intellectual content of the Journey of the Soul into God, but also its structure and creative use of imagery.  Analyzing how Bonaventure employed and adapted the methods of thirteenth century sermo modernus-style of preaching to produce a deftly condensed work, he demonstrates how his text is at once a profound work of mysticism as well as a sophisticated and thoughtful work of medieval theology.

Thomas Aquinas: Questions on the Passions
  • Summa Theologiae 1a2ae 22-48
  • Edited and translated by Robert Miner
  • Published online:
    20 November 2024
    Print publication:
    31 October 2024
  • Thomas Aquinas's Questions on the passions form part of the Summa Theologiae, Aquinas's best-known work. This first standalone edition shows, through a translation that is both rigorously accurate and mirrors the rapid tempo of Aquinas's Latin, what Aquinas says in his landmark treatment of the passions. Aquinas sets the parameters and terms of debate for numerous later theorists of the passions, including Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza and Hume. Some have alleged that Paul and later Christians have (in Nietzsche's words) “an evil eye for the passions,” judging them as 'dirty, disfiguring and heartbreaking'. Yet readers of the present translation will perceive that Aquinas regards the passions as part of created nature, and thereby good in their essence. As they encounter Aquinas's treatment, they will also deepen their knowledge of particular passions-including love, hatred, desire, aversion, pleasure, sorrow, hope, despair, fear, and anger.

Boethius’ ‘Consolation of Philosophy’
  • A Critical Guide
  • Edited by Michael Wiitala
  • Published online:
    23 May 2024
    Print publication:
    30 May 2024
  • Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy was one of the most widely read and influential texts in medieval Europe, considering questions such as How can evil exist in a world governed by God? And how is happiness still attainable despite the vicissitudes of fortune? Written as a dialogue between Boethius and Lady Philosophy, and alternating between poetry and prose, the Consolation is of interest not only to philosophers but to students of classics and literature as well. In this Critical Guide, the first collection of philosophical essays devoted exclusively to the Consolation, thirteen new essays demonstrate its ongoing vitality and break open its riches for a new generation of readers. The essays reflect the diverse array of approaches in contemporary scholarship and attend to both the literary features and the philosophical content of the Consolation. The volume will be invaluable for scholars of medieval philosophy, medieval literature, and the history of ideas.

Interpreting Buridan
  • Critical Essays
  • Edited by Spencer Johnston, Henrik Lagerlund
  • Published online:
    01 February 2024
    Print publication:
    08 February 2024
  • John Buridan (d. 1362) is one of the great thinkers of the later Middle Ages. He is perhaps best known for his contributions to logic, but the range of his thought is wide. This volume of new essays, written by leading Buridan scholars, places Buridan in his philosophical context and examines his writings on logic, modal logic, paradoxes, metaphysics, epistemology, and natural philosophy. It also introduces several new topics of discussion that have not so far been dealt with in scholarship on Buridan, such as his theory of knowledge, his view of artefacts, his conception of women, his writing on emotions, and his moral philosophy. Together the essays produce a rich picture of Buridan's thought and underline the continuing relevance of his philosophical concerns.

Human Nature in Early Franciscan Thought
  • Philosophical Background and Theological Significance
  • Lydia Schumacher
  • Published online:
    27 January 2023
    Print publication:
    19 January 2023
  • In this book, Lydia Schumacher challenges the common assumption that early Franciscan thought simply reiterates the longstanding tradition of Augustine. She demonstrates how scholars from this tradition incorporated the work of Islamic and Jewish philosophers, whose works had recently been translated from Arabic, with a view to developing a unique approach to questions of human nature. These questions pertain to perennial philosophical concerns about the relationship between the body and the soul, the work of human cognition and sensation, and the power of free will. By highlighting the Arabic sources of early Franciscan views on these matters, Schumacher illustrates how scholars working in the early thirteenth century anticipated later developments in Franciscan thought which have often been described as novel or unprecedented. Above all, her study demonstrates that the early Franciscan philosophy of human nature was formulated with a view to bolstering the order's specific theological and religious ideals.

Aquinas on Efficient Causation and Causal Powers
  • Gloria Frost
  • Published online:
    11 November 2022
    Print publication:
    11 August 2022
  • In this innovative book, Gloria Frost reconstructs and analyses Aquinas's theories on efficient causation and causal powers, focusing specifically on natural causal powers and efficient causation in nature. Frost presents each element of Aquinas's theories one by one, comparing them with other theories, as well as examining the philosophical and interpretive ambiguities in Aquinas's thought and proposing fresh solutions to conceptual difficulties. Her discussion includes explanations of Aquinas's technical scholastic terminology in jargon-free prose, as well as background on medieval scientific views - including ordinary language explanations of the medieval physical theories which Aquinas assumed in formulating his views on causation and causal powers. The resulting volume is a rich exploration of a central philosophical topic in medieval philosophy and beyond, and will be valuable especially for scholars and advanced students working on Aquinas and on medieval natural philosophy.

The New Cambridge Companion to Aquinas
  • Edited by Eleonore Stump, Thomas Joseph White
  • Published online:
    30 July 2022
    Print publication:
    11 August 2022
  • This new Companion to Aquinas features entirely new chapters written by internationally recognized experts in the field. It shows the power of Aquinas's philosophical thought and transmits the worldview which he inherited, developed, altered, and argued for, while at the same time revealing to contemporary philosophers the strong connections which there are between Aquinas's interests and views and their own. Its five sections cover the life and works of Aquinas; his metaphysics, including his understanding of the ultimate foundations of reality; his metaethics and ethics, including his virtue ethics; his account of human nature; his theory of the afterlife; his epistemology and his theory of the intellectual virtues; his view of the nature of free will and the relation of grace to free will; and finally some key components of his philosophical theology, including the incarnation and atonement, Christology, and the nature of original sin.

Thomas Aquinas on Virtue
  • Thomas M. Osborne Jr
  • Published online:
    09 June 2022
    Print publication:
    23 June 2022
  • Thomas Aquinas produced a voluminous body of work on moral theory, and much of that work is on virtue, particularly the status and value of the virtues as principles of virtuous acts, and the way in which a moral life can be organized around them schematically. Thomas Osborne presents Aquinas's account of virtue in its historical, philosophical and theological contexts, to show the reader what Aquinas himself wished to teach about virtue. His discussion makes the complexities of Aquinas's moral thought accessible to readers despite the differences between Thomas's texts themselves, and the distance between our background assumptions and his. The book will be valuable for scholars and students in ethics, medieval philosophy, and theology.

Interpreting Duns Scotus
  • Critical Essays
  • Edited by Giorgio Pini
  • Published online:
    23 December 2021
    Print publication:
    06 January 2022
  • John Duns Scotus is commonly recognized as one of the most original thinkers of medieval philosophy. His influence on subsequent philosophers and theologians is enormous and extends well beyond the limits of the Middle Ages. His thought, however, might be intimidating for the non-initiated, because of the sheer number of topics he touched on and the difficulty of his style. The eleven essays collected here, especially written for this volume by some of the leading scholars in the field, take the reader through various topics, including Duns Scotus's intellectual environment, his argument for the existence of God, and his conceptions of modality, order, causality, freedom, and human nature. This volume provides a reliable point of entrance to the thought of Duns Scotus while giving a snapshot of some of the best research that is now being done on this difficult but intellectually rewarding thinker.

A Philosophy Reader from the Circle of Miskawayh
  • Text, Translation and Commentary
  • Edited and translated by Elvira Wakelnig
  • Published online:
    30 September 2021
    Print publication:
    30 January 2014
  • This volume presents the first complete edition of Oxford, MS Marsh 539, a hitherto unpublished philosophy reader compiled anonymously in the eastern Islamic world in the eleventh century. The compilation consists of texts on metaphysics, physiology and ethics, providing excerpts from Arabic versions of Greek philosophical works (Aristotle, Plotinus, Galen) and works by Arabic authors (Qusta ibn Luqa, Farabi, Miskawayh). It preserves fragments of Greek-Arabic translations lost today, including Galen's On My Own Opinions, the Summa Alexandrinorum, and Themistius on Aristotle's Book Lambda. The philosophy reader provides a unique insight into philosophical activity of the place and time of the well-known philosopher Miskawayh, showing us which works had entered the mainstream and were considered necessary for philosophers to know. Elvira Wakelnig's volume includes a new facing-page English translation and a rich commentary which identifies the source texts and examines the historical and philosophical context of each passage.

Thomas Aquinas on the Metaphysics of the Human Act
  • Can Laurens Löwe
  • Published online:
    25 June 2021
    Print publication:
    08 July 2021
  • This book offers a novel account of Aquinas's theory of the human act. It argues that Aquinas takes a human act to be a composite of two power-exercises, where one relates to the other as form to matter. The formal component is an act of the will, and the material component is a power-exercise caused by the will, which Aquinas refers to as the 'commanded act.' The book also argues that Aquinas conceptualizes the act of free choice as a hylomorphic composite: it is, materially, an act of the will, but it inherits a form from reason. As the book aims to show, the core idea of Aquinas's hylomorphic action theory is that the exercise of one power can structure the exercise of another power, and this provides a helpful way to think of the presence of cognition in conation and of intention in bodily movement.

Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed
  • A Critical Guide
  • Edited by Daniel Frank, Aaron Segal
  • Published online:
    18 June 2021
    Print publication:
    01 July 2021
  • Moses Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed (c. 1190) is the greatest and most influential text in the history of Jewish philosophy. Controversial in its day, the Guide directly influenced Aquinas, Spinoza, and Leibniz, and the history of Jewish philosophy took a decisive turn after its appearance. While there continues to be keen interest in Maimonides and his philosophy, this is the first scholarly collection in English devoted specifically to the Guide. It includes contributions from an international team of scholars addressing the most important philosophical themes that range over the three parts of this sprawling work - including topics in the philosophy of language, metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of law, ethics, and political philosophy. There are also essays on the Guide's hermeneutic puzzles, and on its overall structure and philosophical trajectory. The volume will be of interest to philosophers, Judaists, theologians, and medievalists.

William of Ockham: Questions on Virtue, Goodness, and the Will
  • Edited and translated by Eric W. Hagedorn
  • Published online:
    17 May 2021
    Print publication:
    06 May 2021
  • William of Ockham (d. 1347) was among the most influential and the most notorious thinkers of the late Middle Ages. In the twenty-seven questions translated in this volume, most never before published in English, he considers a host of theological and philosophical issues, including the nature of virtue and vice, the relationship between the intellect and the will, the scope of human freedom, the possibility of God's creating a better world, the role of love and hatred in practical reasoning, whether God could command someone to do wrong, and more. In answering these questions, Ockham critically engages with the ethical thought of such predecessors as Aristotle, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, and John Duns Scotus. Students and scholars of both philosophy and historical theology will appreciate the accessible translations and ample explanatory notes on the text.

Free Will and the Rebel Angels in Medieval Philosophy
  • Tobias Hoffmann
  • Published online:
    26 November 2020
    Print publication:
    03 December 2020
  • In this book Tobias Hoffmann studies the medieval free will debate during its liveliest period, from the 1220s to the 1320s, and clarifies its background in Aristotle, Augustine, and earlier medieval thinkers. Among the wide range of authors he examines are not only well-known thinkers such as Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham, but also a number of authors who were just as important in their time and deserve to be rediscovered today. To shed further light on their theories of free will, Hoffmann also explores their competing philosophical explanations of the fall of the angels, that is, the hypothesis of an evil choice made by rational beings under optimal psychological conditions. As he shows, this test case imposed limits on tracing free choices to cognition. His book provides a comprehensive account of a debate that was central to medieval philosophy and continues to occupy philosophers today.

Commentary on Thomas Aquinas's Treatise on Happiness and Ultimate Purpose
  • J. Budziszewski
  • Published online:
    16 October 2020
    Print publication:
    09 January 2020
  • This monumental, line-by-line commentary makes Thomas Aquinas's classic Treatise on Happiness and Ultimate Purpose accessible to all readers. Budziszewski illuminates arguments that even specialists find challenging: What is happiness? Is it something that we have, feel, or do? Does it lie in such things as wealth, power, fame, having friends, or knowing God? Can it actually be attained? This book's luminous prose makes Aquinas's treatise transparent, bringing to light profound underlying issues concerning knowledge, meaning, human psychology, and even the nature of reality.

Virtue and Grace in the Theology of Thomas Aquinas
  • Justin M. Anderson
  • Published online:
    18 September 2020
    Print publication:
    30 July 2020
  • Throughout his writings, Thomas Aquinas exhibited a remarkable stability of thought. However, in some areas such as his theology of grace, his thought underwent titanic developments. In this book, Justin M. Anderson traces both those developments in grace and their causes. After introducing the various meanings of virtue Aquinas utilized, including 'virtue in its fullest sense' and various forms of 'qualified virtue', he explores the historical context that conditioned that account. Through a close analysis of his writings, Anderson unearths Aquinas's own discoveries and analyses that would propel his understanding of human experience, divine action, and supernatural grace in new directions. In the end, we discover an account of virtue that is inextricably linked to his developed understanding of sin, grace and divine action in human life. As such, Anderson challenges the received understanding of Aquinas's account of virtue, as well as his relationship to contemporary virtue ethics.

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