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A primer on the the vocabulary, ideas, and works of this leading Renaissance thinker of the fifteenth century who wrote on everything from papal politics to astronomy to interreligious dialogue.
On Faith, Rationality, and the Other in the Late Middle Ages is an investigation of Nicholas of Cusa that seeks a deeper understanding of this important medieval intellectual and his importance for us today. One of Gergely Bakos's primary aims in this study is to understand Nicholas of Cusa's important and underexamined dimensions of his approach to dialogue with Islam. The framework and the methodology that informs this investigation was inspired by the late Professor Jos Decorte (1954-2001), a Flemish philosopher and mediaevalist at the Catholic University of Leuven in Belgium. Bakos carefully exposits his method of approaching medieval thought (Part One) and then applies and tests this method in practice (Part Two). The most extensive part of this study offers a sketch of the historical background of Nicholas's dialogue with Islam and investigates what possibilities this approach offers. All of this is placed in dialogue with two other mediaeval approaches to Islam (Thomas Aquinas and Ramon Lull). The final chapters discuss Nicholas of Cusa's project from a perspective offered by his mystical theology. The book culminates in an exploration of the possibilities of Nicholas of Cusa's approach by testing the framework of the study. Finally, the author evaluates the application of his own approach (Part Three). The study ultimately has two purposes: to contribute to a better understanding of Nicholas of Cusa's thought, on the one hand, and, on the other, to test a particular methodology and interpretative framework for the understanding of mediaeval culture.
There is a tendency in modern scholarship to describe the Renaissance Humanists merely as readers—as interpreters happily absorbed within the bounds of their chosen classical texts. In Theory as Practice, Nancy Struever contests this accepted notion; by focusing on ethical inquiry, she presents the Humanists as engaged in subtle, innovative moral work. Struever argues that the accomplishment of five major Renaissance figures—Petrarch, Nicolaus Cusanus, Lorenzo Valla, Machiavelli, and Montaigne—was to consider theory as practice and thus engage the ethics of inquiry. She notes three stages of investigation, the first represented by Petrarch, who "relocated" ethical inquiry from a theoretical realm to a familiar practice responsive to daily experience. Next, Struever describes how Cusanus and Valla assume Petrarch's relocation, yet confect ethics into discursive disciplines. Finally, while both Machiavelli and Montaigne produced strong revisions of discipline, they considered the problems of addressing the non-inquirer as well. Struever urges modern readers to employ both rhetorical and philosophical analysis to reveal these Humanists' aggressive tactics of presentation as well as their novel disciplinary reorientation. By doing so, she suggests, we discover how Renaissance ethical inquiry illuminates, and is illuminated by, the modern ethical theory of such philosophers as Peirce, Wittgenstein, Bernard Williams, and Quine.
This book offers a new theological approach to the multiverse hypothesis. With a distinctive methodology, it shows that participatory metaphysics from ancient and medieval sources represents a fertile theological ground on which to grapple with contemporary ideas of the multiverse. There are three key thinkers and themes discussed in the book: Plato and cosmic multiplicity, Aquinas and cosmic diversity, and Nicholas of Cusa and cosmic infinity. Their insights are brought into interaction with a diverse range of contemporary theological, philosophical, and scientific figures to demonstrate that a participatory account of the relationship between God and creation leads to a greater continuity between theology and the multiverse proposal in modern cosmology. This is in contrast to existing work on the subject, which often assumes that the two are in conflict. By offering a fresh way to engage theologically with multiverse theory, this book will be a unique resource for any scholar of Religion and Science, Theology, Metaphysics, and Cosmology.
This second edition concentrates on various philosophers and theologians from the medieval Arabian, Jewish, and Christian worlds. It principally centers on authors such as Abumashar, Saadiah Gaon and Alcuin from the eighth century and follows the intellectual developments of the three traditions up to the fifteenth-century Ibn Khaldun, Hasdai Crescas and Marsilio Ficino. The spiritual journeys presuppose earlier human sources, such as the philosophy of Plato, Aristotle, Plotinus, and Porphyry and various Stoic authors, the revealed teachings of the Jewish Law, the Koran and the Christian Bible. The Fathers of the Church, such as St. Augustine and Gregory the Great, provided examples of theology in their attempts to reconcile revealed truth and man’s philosophical knowledge and deserve attention as pre-medieval contributors to medieval intellectual life. Avicenna and Averroes, Maimonides and Gersonides, St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure, stand out in the three traditions as special medieval contributors who deserve more attention. This second edition of Historical Dictionary of Medieval Philosophy and Theology contains a chronology, an introduction, appendixes, and an extensive bibliography. The dictionary section has over 300 cross-referenced entries on important persons, events, and concepts that shaped medieval philosophy and theology. This book is an excellent resource for students, researchers, and anyone wanting to know more about medieval philosophy and theology.
This work is a substantial contribution to the history of philosophy. Its subject, the ninth-century philosopher John Scottus Eriugena, developed a form of idealism that owed as much to the Greek Neoplatonic tradition as to the Latin fathers and anticipated the priority of the subject in its modern, most radical statement: German idealism. Moran has written the most comprehensive study yet of Eriugena's philosophy, tracing the sources of his thinking and analyzing his most important text, the Periphyseon. This volume will be of special interest to historians of mediaeval philosophy, history, and theology.
This is a book of English translations of the writings of one of the most important geniuses in history--Cardinal Nicolaus of Cusa (1401-1464). He created ideas which had never been conceived before and which changed history for the better--up through our time and far, far into the future. His thinking processes are sometimes summed up in his concept of the “coincidence of opposites.” Instead of starting his thought process from accumulated sense perceptions and deducing law from observed appearances, Cusa starts with the hypothesis that there must be an original potential from which all multiplicity derives. By starting from the top, or “the Origin,” Cusa was able to solve previously insoluble problems. For example, his idea that the “right to govern comes from the consent of the governed” was not only the basis for solving clashes within the Catholic Church, and even the attempt to reunify all of the various Christian churches at the Council of Florence, but also lay at the heart of the experiments in government set up in the New England colonies of North America and the later creation of the United States Constitution. Besides the title work “On the Peace of Faith” which resolves the conflicts among the religions, 17 other papers are translated into English--14 for the first time. The ongoing renaissance in the study of Cusa worldwide is the basis for resolving the conflicts which still plague the world.
The Middle Ages span a period of well over a millennium: from the emperor Constantine's Christian conversion in 312 to the early sixteenth century. During this time there was remarkable continuity of thought, but there were also many changes made in different philosophies: various breaks, revivals and rediscoveries. David Luscombe's history of Medieval Thought steers a clear path through this long period, beginning with three great influences on medieval philosophy: Augustine, Boethius, and Pseudo-Denis, and focusing on Alcuin, then Anselm, Abelard, Aquinas, Ockham, Duns Scotus, and Eckhart amongst others from the twelfth to the fifteenth century. Medieval philosophy is widely regarded as having a theological and religious orientation, but more recently attention has been given to the early study of logic, language, and the philosophy of science. This history therefore gives a fascinating insight into medieval views on aspects such as astronomy, materialism, perception, and the nature of the soul, as well as of God.
The doctrine of theosis means a salvation that is the deification of the saved. The saved actually become God. This unusual doctrine lies at the heart of Nicholas of Cusa's (1401-1464) mystical metaphysics. It is here examined for the first time as a theme in its own right, along with its implications for Cusanus's doctrine of God, his theological anthropology, and his epistemology.