Download or read book A Concise Introduction to the Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa written by Jasper Hopkins and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1978 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Philosophy of Nicholas of Cusa written by Pavel Floss and published by Schwabe Verlag (Basel). This book was released on 2020-05-13 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of the broad variety of Cusanus' work, this book discusses six of his writings, careful not to isolate them from the whole of his work. It instead presents them against the maturation of Cusanus' thinking as it developed from his first sermons up to his shortest philosophical text De apice theoriae. The texts in question are De docta ignorantia, De coniecturis, Idiota de mente, De beryllo, Trialogus de possest and De apice theoriae. In the search for God, or rather in Cusanus' lifetime eff orts to have his spirit touch the fi rst principle and the basis of all things, new perspectives on the world and man within would open up for Cusanus. Respecting this basic intention of Cusanus' thinking, the author primarily deals with Cusanus' ontotheological (metaphysical) claims and, in their context, turns his attention to the cosmological, or anthropologico-gnoseological opinions.
Download or read book Introducing Nicholas of Cusa written by Bellitto, Christopher M. and published by Paulist Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 449 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Art of Conjecture written by Clyde Lee Miller and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2021-03-12 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Learned ignorance,” the recognition that God is beyond us and our knowing capacities is the theological concept for which Nicholas of Cusa is most famous. Despite God’s apparent absence Nicholas offers original ways to think about God that would unite his presence with his absence. He called these proposals “conjectures” (coniecturae). Conjecture and conjecturing are central to the methodology of Nicholas’s philosophical theology and to his thinking about human knowledge. By using concrete examples from the everyday life of his times as symbolic imagery Nicholas makes what we say about God imaginatively available and theoretically plausible. He called such conjectural symbols “aenigmata” (= “symbolic or ‘enigmatic’ conjectures”) because they partially clarify and likewise point to an exact truth that is beyond us. Novel and imaginative, Nicholas’s conjectural examples break with the traditional medieval Aristotelian examples and provide further evidence of his role as a figure bridging medieval and Renaissance thought. Following his earlier book, Reading Cusanus (The Catholic University of America Press, 2003), Clyde Lee Miller here examines and comments on the meaning of “conjecture” in Nicholas of Cusa. The Art of Conjecture: Nicholas of Cusa on Knowledge explores what Nicholas meant by conjecture and its import as demonstrated in his treatises and sermons. Beginning with Nicholas’ On Conjectures, Miller analyzes a series of conjectural symbols and proposals across Nicholas’s less frequently discussed texts and recently published sermons. This early Renaissance thinker offers an original and ground-breaking way of framing speculation in philosophical theology and more generally in philosophy itself.
Download or read book Fundamentals of Philosophy written by John Shand and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2004-03-01 with total page 460 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fundamentals of Philosophy is a comprehensive and accessible introduction to philosophy. Based on the well-known series of the same name, this textbook brings together specially commissioned articles by leading philosophers of philosophy's key topics. Each chapter provides an authoritative overview of topics commonly taught at undergraduate level, focusing on the major issues that typically arise when studying the subject. Discussions are up to date and written in an engaging manner so as to provide students with the core building blocks of their degree course. Fundamentals of Philosophy is an ideal starting point for those coming to philosophy for the first time and will be a useful complement to the primary texts studied at undergraduate level. Ideally suited to novice philosophy students, it will also be of interest to those in related subjects across the humanities and social sciences.
Download or read book Nicholas of Cusa s on Learned Ignorance written by Karsten Harries and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2024-06 with total page 501 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the first commentary to have been written on Nicholas of Cusa's most famous work, On Learned Ignorance. This fact testifies to the difficulty of what has long been recognized to be the most significant philosophical text produced by the Renaissance. While there are many passages in the work that can be cited in support of Cassirer's celebration of Cusanus as the first modern philosopher, that judgment is challenged by the way his work is rooted in a faith and a tradition likely to strike us as thoroughly medieval. This commentary shows how closely the two are linked. Despite the many ways in which what the cardinal has to say belongs to a past that the progress of reason would seem to have left irrecoverably behind, it yet provides us with a continuing challenge. Key to On Learned Ignorance is the incommensurability of the infinite and the finite, of God and creation. Cusanus lets us recognize the essential transcendence of reality, so different from the ontology implied by Descartes' insistence on clear and distinct understanding, which has presided over the progress of science and has helped shape our world. What makes Cusanus' thought important is not the way it anticipates modernity, but the way it challenges often taken-for-granted presuppositions of our worldview, most importantly a distinctly modern self-assertion or self-elevation that has made our human reason the measure of reality. If it is impossible to deny the countless ways in which our science and technology have given us ever deeper insights into the mysteries of nature and improved our lives, it is equally impossible to deny that this very progress today endangers this fragile earth and the quality of our lives. Cusanus can help us preserve our humanity.
Download or read book Models of God and Alternative Ultimate Realities written by Jeanine Diller and published by Springer Science & Business Media. This book was released on 2013-06-13 with total page 1000 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The envisioned volume is a collection of recent essays about the philosophical exploration, critique and comparison of (a) the major philosophical models of God, gods and other ultimate realities implicit in the world’s philosophical schools and religions, and of (b) the ideas of such models and doing such modeling per se. The aim is to identify exactly what a model of ultimate reality is; create a comprehensive and accessible collection of extant models; and determine how best, philosophically, to model ultimate reality, if possible and desirable.
Download or read book Nicholas of Cusa A Companion to his Life and his Times written by Morimichi Watanabe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-05-06 with total page 426 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work is a guide to the life, thought and activities of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1464), the great fifteenth-century philosopher, theologian, jurist, author of mystical and ecclesiastical treatises, cardinal and reformer. It is intended not only for advanced scholars, but also for beginners and those simply curious about a man who has been called 'one of the greatest Germans of the fifteenth century' and a 'medieval thinker for the modern age'. The book provides a series of detailed but readable essays on ideas, persons, and places, a work developed over the course of nearly three decades. First, it contains articles on the important events and concepts that affected Cusanus--philosophical, religious, intellectual and political. Then it turns to his precursors and contemporaries, both friendly and critical. These include philosophers, theologians, politicians, and canon lawyers. And third, the book follows the footsteps of the man from Kues and examines various sites where he lived, studied, or visited. Because the author has also visited many of these sites, he can contribute personal observations to enliven the journey. To add to the book's usefulness as a resource and reference tool, each entry is followed by a bibliography containing both recent and older works. The purpose of the volume is to gain a greater appreciation of Cusanus and his legacy by striving for a total view of his thought and experience instead of narrowly focusing on specific philosophical, theological or intellectual ideas, or certain periods of his activities in isolation from other facets of this compelling figure.
Download or read book The Indiscrete Image written by Thomas A. Carlson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2009-05-15 with total page 263 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Humanity’s creative capacity has never been more unsettling than it is at our current moment, when it has ushered us into new technological worlds that challenge the very definition of “the human.” Those anxious to safeguard the human against techno-scientific threats often appeal to religious traditions to protect the place and dignity of the human. But how well do we understand both theological tradition and today’s technological culture? In The Indiscrete Image, Thomas A. Carlson challenges our common ideas about both, arguing instead that it may be humanity’s final lack of definition that first enables, and calls for, human creativity and its correlates—including technology, tradition, and their inextricable interplay within religious existence. Framed in response to Martin Heidegger’s influential account of the relation between technological modernity and theological tradition, The Indiscrete Image builds an understanding of creativity as conditioned by insurmountable unknowing and incalculable possibility through alternative readings of Christian theological tradition and technological culture—and the surprising resonance between these two. Carlson concludes that the always ongoing work of world creation, tied essentially to human self-creation, implies neither an idol’s closure nor an icon’s transcendence, but the “indiscrete image” whose love makes possible—by keeping open—both the human and its world.
Download or read book Theory as Practice written by Nancy S. Struever and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1992-03 with total page 282 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Multiverse and Participatory Metaphysics written by Jamie Boulding and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-09-30 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Historical Dictionary of Medieval Philosophy and Theology written by Stephen F. Brown and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-08-10 with total page 453 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Reading Cusanus written by Clyde Lee Miller and published by Catholic University of America Press. This book was released on 2019-01-25 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This text presents readings of six of the most important theoretical works of Nicholas of Cusa (1401-1463). Though Nicholas's writings have long been studied as either scholastic Aristotelian or proto-Kantian, Miller locates Cusanus squarely in the Christian Neoplatonic tradition. He demonstrates how Nicholas worked on his own original synthesis of that tradition by fashioning a conjectural view of main categories of Christian thought: God, the universe, Jesus Christ and human beings. Each reading reveals how Nicholas's project of learned ignorance is played out in striking metaphors for God and the relation of God to creation. The six works read span the last quarter of Nicholas's life (1440-1463) and include On Learned Ignorance, Conjectures, The Layman - About Mind, The Vision of God, The Not Other and The Hunt of Wisdom. These readings are explications of the text; they interpret each work as a whole and focus in particular on the themes that order the work and how these get played out in its details.
Download or read book The Philosophy of John Scottus Eriugena written by Dermot Moran and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2004-08-19 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Cusanus written by Peter J. Casarella and published by CUA Press. This book was released on 2006-03-29 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume offers a detailed historical background to Cusanus's thinking while also assaying his significance for the present. It brings together major contributions from the English-speaking world as well as voices from Europe.
Download or read book Toward a New Council of Florence written by Nicolaus of Cusa and published by Executive Intelligence Review. This book was released on 2015-09-03 with total page 614 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book Medieval Thought written by David Edward Luscombe and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
