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Metaphysics and Hermeneutics in the Medieval Platonic Tradition consists of twelve essays originally published between 2006 and 2015, dealing with main trends and specific figures within the medieval Platonic tradition. Three essays provide general surveys of the transmission of late ancient thought to the Middle Ages with emphasis on the ancient authors, the themes, and their medieval readers, respectively. The remaining essays deal especially with certain major figures in the Platonic tradition, including pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Iohannes Scottus Eriugena, and Nicholas of Cusa. The principal conceptual aim of the collection is to establish the primacy of hermeneutics within the philosophical program developed by these authors: in other words, to argue that their philosophical activity, substantially albeit not exclusively, consists of the reading and evaluation of authoritative texts. The essays also argue that the role of hermeneutics varies in the course of the tradition between being a means towards the development of metaphysical theory and being an integral component of metaphysics itself. In addition, such changes in the status and application of hermeneutics to metaphysics are shown to be accompanied by a shift from emphasizing the connection between logic and philosophy to emphasizing that between rhetoric and philosophy. The collection of essays fills in a lacuna in the history of philosophy in general between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries. It also initiates a dialogue between the metaphysical hermeneutics of medieval Platonism and certain modern theories of hermeneutics, structuralism, and deconstruction. The book will be of special interest to students of the classical tradition in western thought, and more generally to students of medieval philosophy, theology, history, and literature.
Metaphysics and Hermeneutics in the Medieval Platonic Tradition consists of twelve essays originally published between 2006 and 2015, dealing with main trends and specific figures within the medieval Platonic tradition. Three essays provide general surveys of the transmission of late ancient thought to the Middle Ages with emphasis on the ancient authors, the themes, and their medieval readers, respectively. The remaining essays deal especially with certain major figures in the Platonic tradition, including pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite, Iohannes Scottus Eriugena, and Nicholas of Cusa. The principal conceptual aim of the collection is to establish the primacy of hermeneutics within the philosophical program developed by these authors: in other words, to argue that their philosophical activity, substantially albeit not exclusively, consists of the reading and evaluation of authoritative texts. The essays also argue that the role of hermeneutics varies in the course of the tradition between being a means towards the development of metaphysical theory and being an integral component of metaphysics itself. In addition, such changes in the status and application of hermeneutics to metaphysics are shown to be accompanied by a shift from emphasizing the connection between logic and philosophy to emphasizing that between rhetoric and philosophy. The collection of essays fills in a lacuna in the history of philosophy in general between the fifth and the fifteenth centuries. It also initiates a dialogue between the metaphysical hermeneutics of medieval Platonism and certain modern theories of hermeneutics, structuralism, and deconstruction. The book will be of special interest to students of the classical tradition in western thought, and more generally to students of medieval philosophy, theology, history, and literature. (CS1094).
This collection of essays delineates the history of the rather disparate intellectual tradition usually labeled as "Platonic" or "Neoplatonic". In chronological order, the book covers the most eminent philosophic schools of thought within that tradition. The most important terms of the Platonic tradition are studied together with a discussion of their semantic implications, the philosophical and theological claims associated with the terms, the sources that furnish the terms, and the intellectual traditions aligned with or opposed to them. The contributors thereby provide a vivid intellectual map of the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period. Contributions are written in English or German.
Originally published in 1972, Medieval Logic and Metaphysics shows how formal logic can be used in the clarification of philosophical problems. An elementary exposition of Leśniewski’s Onotology, an important system of contemporary logic, is followed by studies of central philosophical themes such as Negation and Non-being, Essence and Existence, Meaning and Reference, Part and Whole. Philosophers and theologians discussed include St Anselm, St Thomas Aquinas, Abelard, Ockham, Scotus, Hume and Russell.
The study of pre-modern anthropology requires the close examination of the relationship between nature and human society, which has been both precarious and threatening as well as productive, soothing, inviting, and pleasurable. Much depends on the specific circumstances, as the works by philosophers, theologians, poets, artists, and medical practitioners have regularly demonstrated. It would not be good enough, as previous scholarship has commonly done, to examine simply what the various writers or artists had to say about nature. While modern scientists consider just the hard-core data of the objective world, cultural historians and literary scholars endeavor to comprehend the deeper meaning of the concept of nature presented by countless writers and artists. Only when we have a good grasp of the interactions between people and their natural environment, are we in a position to identify and interpret mental structures, social and economic relationships, medical and scientific concepts of human health, and the messages about all existence as depicted in major art works. In light of the current conditions threatening to bring upon us a global crisis, it matters centrally to take into consideration pre-modern discourses on nature and its enormous powers to understand the topoi and tropes determining the concepts through which we perceive nature. Nature thus proves to be a force far beyond all human comprehensibility, being both material and spiritual depending on our critical approaches.
This book represents the first ever systematic philosophical study of Marsilio Ficino’s Commentary on Plotinus’ ‘Enneads’ (first published in Florence, 1492), this work of Ficino being arguably as definitive for the Florentine thinker’s later work as the Platonic Theology was for his earlier. Publication of the present study uniquely illuminates the extent to which Plotinus had always been the crucial influence over Ficino’s revolutionary projects of introducing Platonic thought based on original Greek sources to western Europe, correcting certain features of late medieval and Renaissance Aristotelianism, and laying the foundations of a new Christian Platonism. The study can be read both as an independent introduction to Ficino’s later philosophy and as the complement to the first modern edition and translation of the Commentary on the 'Enneads' itself also by Stephen Gersh (I Tatti Renaissance Library, 2017-).
"This is the first volume exclusively devoted to the Expositio by Berthold of Moosburg (c.1295-c.1361) on Proclus' Elements of Theology. The breadth of its vision surpasses every other known commentary on the Elements of Theology, for it seeks to present a coherent account of the Platonic tradition as such (unified through the concord of Proclus and Dionysius) and at the same time to consolidate and transform a legacy of metaphysics developed in the German-speaking lands by Peripatetic authors (like Albert the Great, Ulrich of Strassburg, and Dietrich of Freiberg). This volume aims to provide a basis for further research and discussion of this unduly overlooked commentary, whose historical-philosophical importance as an attempt to refound Western metaphysics is beginning to be recognized. The publication of this volume has received the generous support of the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union's Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme through the ERC Consolidator Grant NeoplAT: A Comparative Analysis of the Middle East, Byzantium and the Latin West (9th-16th Centuries), grant agreement No 771640 (www.neoplat.eu). Contributors are: Henryk Anzulewicz, Alessandra Beccarisi, Dragos Calma, Michael W. Dunne, Tommaso Ferro, Stephen Gersh, Wouter Goris, Paul Hellmeier, Evan King, Theo Kobusch, Ezequiel Ludueña, Alessandro Palazzo, Fiorella Retucci, Sylvain Roudaut, Loris Sturlese"--
Thomas Pfau's study of images and visual experience is a tour de force linking Platonic metaphysics to modern phenomenology and probing literary, philosophical, and theological accounts of visual experience from Plato to Rilke. Incomprehensible Certainty presents a sustained reflection on the nature of images and the phenomenology of visual experience. Taking the word "image" (eikōn) not only as the essential medium of art and literature but as foundational for the intuitive ways in which we make contact with our "lifeworld," Thomas Pfau draws in equal measure on Platonic metaphysics and modern phenomenology to advance a series of interlocking claims. First, Pfau shows that, beginning with Plato's later dialogues, being and appearance came to be understood as ontologically distinct from (but no longer opposed to) one another. Second, in contrast to the idol that is typically gazed at and visually consumed as an object of desire, this study positions the image (eikōn) as a medium whose intrinsic abundance and excess reveal to us its metaphysical function, namely, as the visible analogue of an invisible, numinous reality. Finally, the interpretations unfolded in this book (from Plato, Plotinus, pseudo-Dionysius, John Damascene via Bernard of Clairvaux, Bonaventure, Julian of Norwich, and Nicholas of Cusa to modern writers and artists such as Goethe, Ruskin, Turner, Hopkins, Cézanne, and Rilke) affirm the essential complementarity of image and word, visual intuition and hermeneutic practice, in theology, philosophy, and literature. Like Pfau's previous book, Minding the Modern, Incomprehensive Certainty is a major work. With over fifty illustrations, the book will interest students and scholars of philosophy, theology, literature, and art history.
Medieval semantic theories develop out of Aristotle’s On Interpretation, in which he notes that “Spoken sounds are symbols of affections in the soul, and written marks symbols of spoken sounds” (tr. J. L. Ackrill, OUP 1984). The medieval commentary tradition elaborates on Aristotle’s theory in light of various epistemological and metaphysical commitments, including those entailed by the doctrine of the transcendentals that emerges from the tradition in the writings of Philip the Chancellor (d. 1236). Transcendental attributes such as unity, truth and goodness (properties that figure into most if not all accounts of the transcendentals) characterize every being as such, and hence the doctrine of the transcendentals promised some knowledge of God. This hope, together with the general medieval consensus that the cognitive acts by which we grasp extra-mental entities are veridical (i.e., in most cases, these acts represent what the cognizing subject takes them to represent) encouraged medieval thinkers to devote considerable effort to discerning how concepts latch onto reality. Medieval Metaphysics, or Is It “Just Semantics”? follows these attempts as concerns the signification of theological discourse in general and Trinitarian semantics in particular, the proper object of the intellect, and what is signified through quidditative or essential definition.
Medieval Literature and Social Politics brings together seventeen articles by literary historian Stephen Knight. The book primarily focuses on the social and political meaning of medieval literature, in the past and the present. It provides an account of how early heroic texts relate to the issues surrounding leadership and conflict in Wales, France and England, and how the myth of the Grail and the French reworking of Celtic stories relate to contemporary society and its concerns. Further chapters examine Chaucer’s readings of his social world, the medieval reworkings of the Arthur and Merlin myths, and the popular social statements in ballads and other literary forms. The concluding chapters examine the Anglo-nationalist `Arctic Arthur’, and the ways in which Arthur, Merlin and Robin Hood can be treated in terms of modern studies of the history of emotions and the environment. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of medieval Europe, as well as those interested in social and political history, medieval literature and modern medievalism (CS 1099).