Download or read book Subjectivity and Selfhood in Medieval and Early Modern Philosophy written by Jari Kaukua and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-02-23 with total page 295 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is a collection of studies on topics related to subjectivity and selfhood in medieval and early modern philosophy. The individual contributions approach the theme from a number of angles varying from cognitive and moral psychology to metaphysics and epistemology. Instead of a complete overview on the historical period, the book provides detailed glimpses into some of the most important figures of the period, such as Augustine, Avicenna, Aquinas, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz and Hume. The questions addressed include the ethical problems of the location of one's true self and the proper distribution of labour between desire, passion and reason, and the psychological tasks of accounting for subjective experience and self-knowledge and determining different types of self-awareness.

Download or read book The Self written by and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-08-03 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Self: A History explores the ways in which the concept of an 'I' or a 'self' has been developed and deployed at different times in the history of Western Philosophy. It also offers a striking contrast case, the 'interconnected' self, who appears in some expressions of African Philosophy. The I or self seems engulfed in paradoxes. We are selves and we seem to be conscious of ourselves, yet it is very difficult to say what a self is. Although we refer to ourselves, when we try to find or locate ourselves, the I seems elusive. We can find human bodies, but we do not refer to ourselves by referring to our bodies: we do not know that we are raising our hands or thinking hard by looking at our arms or catching a glimpse of our furrowed brows in a mirror. The essays in this volume engage many philosophical resources--metaphysics, epistemology, phenomenology, philosophy of psychology and philosophy of language--to try to shed needed light on these puzzles.

Download or read book The Bonds of Humanity written by Cary J. Nederman and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2019-12-10 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Of the great philosophers of pagan antiquity, Marcus Tullius Cicero is the only one whose ideas were continuously accessible to the Christian West following the collapse of the Roman Empire. Yet, in marked contrast with other ancient philosophers, Cicero has largely been written out of the historical narrative on early European political thought, and the reception of his ideas has barely been studied. The Bonds of Humanity corrects this glaring oversight, arguing that the influence of Cicero’s ideas in medieval and early modern Europe was far more pervasive than previously believed. In this book, Cary J. Nederman presents a persuasive counternarrative to the widely accepted belief in the dominance of Aristotelian thought. Surveying the work of a diverse range of thinkers from the twelfth to the sixteenth century, including John of Salisbury, Brunetto Latini, Marsiglio of Padua, Christine de Pizan, and Bartolomé de Las Casas, Nederman shows that these men and women inherited, deployed, and adapted key Ciceronian themes. He argues that the rise of scholastic Aristotelianism in the thirteenth century did not supplant but rather supplemented and bolstered Ciceronian ideas, and he identifies the character and limits of Ciceronianism that distinguish it from other schools of philosophy. Highly original and compelling, this paradigm-shifting book will be greeted enthusiastically by students and scholars of early European political thought and intellectual history, particularly those engaged in the conversation about the role played by ancient and early Christian ideas in shaping the theories of later times.

Download or read book The Embodied Soul written by Marek Gensler and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-06-01 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book contains a collection of papers devoted to the problems of body, mind and soul in medieval Europe between 1200 and 1420. Modern discussions of the mind-body relationship seldom look back into the past further than the psycho-somatic dualism of Descartes which started the mechanistic approach in biology and medicine. The authors of the volume go beyond that fault line to investigate the tradition of medieval natural philosophy and its ancient sources and analyze the issues forming a borderland between physiology and psychology. They also demonstrate that the medieval tradition was rich and diverse for it offered a wide variety of the discussed problems as well as the methodological approaches. This volume is the first attempt to cover a diversity of topics and methods employed in the medieval debates on body, mind and soul as well as their interrelationships. The Embodied Soul is a must-have for all those interested in puzzling dilemmas of how a living organism functions and how its inner life can be explained as well as for all those interested in the history of thought in general. Chapter 14 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

Download or read book Scala Christus est written by Giovanni Tortoriello and published by Mohr Siebeck. This book was released on 2023-05-09 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the nineteenth century, scholars have debated the controversial relationships between humanism, the Renaissance and the Reformation. Challenging the dominant narrative on the subject, Giovanni Tortoriello reconstructs the debates that characterized the early Reformation movements. He shows that Martin Luther's theology of the cross developed in reaction to the irenic tendencies of the Renaissance. With the spread of Platonism, Hermeticism, and Kabbalah in the fifteenth century, the identity of Christianity shifted and the boundaries between the different religions thinned. In response to this attempt to minimize the differences among the various religions, Luther reiterated the centrality and uniqueness of the salvific event of the cross. Confessional biases and theological prejudices have obliterated the role that Platonism, Hermeticism, and Christian Kabbalah played in the early Reformation debates. The author reconstructs these controversies and situates Luther's theology of the cross in this historical context.

Download or read book Descartes written by David Cunning and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-25 with total page 425 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: René Descartes (1596–1650) is well-known for his introspective turn away from sensible bodies and toward non-sensory ideas of mind, body, and God. Such a turn is appropriate, Descartes supposes, but only once in the course of life, and only to arrive at a more accurate picture of reality that we then incorporate in everyday embodied life. In this clear and engaging book David Cunning introduces and examines the full range of Descartes’ philosophy. A central focus of the book is Descartes’ view that embodied human beings become more perfect to the degree that they move in the direction of finite approximations of independence, activity, immutability, and increased knowledge. Beginning with an introduction and a chapter on Descartes’ life and works, Cunning also addresses the following key topics: Descartes on the wonders of the material universe skepticism as epistemic garbage, and the easy dissolution of hyperbolic doubt Descartes’ three arguments for the existence of God the ontology of possibility and necessity freedom and embodiment arguments for the immateriality of mind sensible bodies and the pragmatic certainty by which to navigate them Descartes’ stoic view on how best to live. Descartes is an outstanding introduction to one of the greatest of Western philosophers. Including a chronology, suggestions for further reading, and a glossary of key terms, it is essential reading for anyone studying Descartes and the history of modern philosophy.

Download or read book The Philosophy of Hope written by Alexander Douglas and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2023-07-24 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Can philosophy be a source of hope? Today it is common to believe that the answer is no – that providing hope, if it is possible at all, belongs either to the predictive sciences or to religion. In this exciting and stimulating book, however, Alexander Douglas argues that the philosophy of Spinoza can offer something akin to religious hope. Douglas shows how Spinoza is able, without appealing to belief in any traditional afterlife or supernatural grace, to develop a profound and original theory of how humans can escape from the conditions of death and sin. Douglas argues that this theory of escape, which Spinoza calls beatitude, is the centrepiece of his entire philosophy, though scholars have often downplayed or ignored it. One reason for this scholarly neglect might be the difficulty of understanding Spinoza’s theory, which departs from the standard doctrines and methods of Western philosophy. Douglas's interpretation therefore seeks inspiration beyond the Western tradition, drawing especially on the classical Daoist text Zhuangzi and its commentaries. Here, Douglas argues, surprising resonances with Spinoza’s core ideas can be found, leading to a new way of understanding his strange yet compelling theory of beatitude.

Download or read book The Formation of Post Classical Philosophy in Islam written by Frank Griffel and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 665 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Scholars have come to recognize the importance of classical Islamic philosophy both in its own right and in its preservation of and engagement with Greek philosophical ideas. At the same time, the period immediately following the so-called classical era has been considered a sort of dark age, in which Islamic thought entered a long decline. In this monumental new work, Frank Griffel seeks to overturn this conventional wisdom, arguing that what he calls the "post-classical" period has been unjustly maligned and neglected by previous generations of scholars. The Formation of Post-Classical Philosophy in Islam is a comprehensive study of the far-reaching changes that led to a re-shaping of the philosophical discourse in Islam during the twelfth century. Earlier Western scholars thought that Islam's engagement with the tradition of Greek philosophy ended during that century. More recent analyses suggest that Islamic thinkers instead integrated Greek thought into the genre of rationalist Muslim theology (kalām). Griffel argues that even this new view misses a key point. In addition to the integration of Greek ideas into kalām, Muslim theologians picked up the discourse of classical philosophy in Islam (falsafa) and began to produce books in the tradition of Plato, Aristotle, and Avicenna—a new and oft-misunderstood genre they called "ḥikma"—in which they left aside theological concerns. They wrote in both genres, kalām and ḥikma, and the same writers argued for opposing teachings on the nature of God, the world's creation, and the afterlife depending on the genre in which they were writing. Griffel shows how careful attention to genre demonstrates both the coherence and ambiguity of this new philosophical approach. A work of extraordinary breadth and depth, The Formation of Post-Classical Philosophy in Islam offers a detailed, insightful history of philosophy in Iraq, Iran, and Central Asia during the twelfth century. It will be essential reading for anyone interested in the history of philosophy or the history of Islam.

Download or read book Analytic Philosophy and Avicenna written by Mohammad Azadpur and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-03-17 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work engages in a constructive, yet subtle, dialogue with the nuanced accounts of sensory intentionality and empirical knowledge offered by the Islamic philosopher Avicenna. This discourse has two main objectives: (1) providing an interpretation of Avicenna’s epistemology that avoids reading him as a precursor to British empiricists or as a full-fledged emanatist and (2) bringing light to the importance of Avicenna’s account of experience to relevant contemporary Anglo-American discussions in epistemology and metaphysics. These two objectives are interconnected. Anglo-American philosophy provides the framework for a novel reading of Avicenna on knowledge and reality, and the latter, in turn, contributes to adjusting some aspects of the former. Advancing the Avicennian perspective on contemporary analytic discourse, this volume is a key resource for researchers and students interested in comparative and analytic epistemology and metaphysics as well as Islamic philosophy.

Download or read book Language between God and the Poets written by Alexander Key and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2018-08-28 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press’s Open Access publishing program. Visit www.luminosoa.org to learn more. In the Arabic eleventh-century, scholars were intensely preoccupied with the way that language generated truth and beauty. Their work in poetics, logic, theology, and lexicography defined the intellectual space between God and the poets. In Language Between God and the Poets, Alexander Key argues that ar-Raghib al-Isfahani, Ibn Furak, Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani shared a conceptual vocabulary based on the words ma‘na and haqiqah. They used this vocabulary to build theories of language, mind, and reality that answered perennial questions: how to structure language and reference, how to describe God, how to construct logical arguments, and how to explain poetic affect.

Download or read book Animal Rationality written by Anselm Oelze and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Animal Rationality: Later Medieval Theories 1250-1350, Anselm Oelze offers the first comprehensive and systematic exploration of theories of animal rationality in the later Middle Ages.

Download or read book Platonism and Christian Thought in Late Antiquity written by Panagiotis G. Pavlos and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2019-06-07 with total page 367 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Platonism and Christian Thought in Late Antiquity examines the various ways in which Christian intellectuals engaged with Platonism both as a pagan competitor and as a source of philosophical material useful to the Christian faith. The chapters are united in their goal to explore transformations that took place in the reception and interaction process between Platonism and Christianity in this period. The contributions in this volume explore the reception of Platonic material in Christian thought, showing that the transmission of cultural content is always mediated, and ought to be studied as a transformative process by way of selection and interpretation. Some chapters also deal with various aspects of the wider discussion on how Platonic, and Hellenic, philosophy and early Christian thought related to each other, examining the differences and common ground between these traditions. Platonism and Christian Thought in Late Antiquity offers an insightful and broad ranging study on the subject, which will be of interest to students of both philosophy and theology in the Late Antique period, as well as anyone working on the reception and history of Platonic thought, and the development of Christian thought.

Download or read book After Certainty written by Robert Pasnau and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2017-11-10 with total page 393 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No part of philosophy is as disconnected from its history as is epistemology. After Certainty offers a reconstruction of that history, understood as a series of changing expectations about the cognitive ideal that beings such as us might hope to achieve in a world such as this. The story begins with Aristotle and then looks at how his epistemic program was developed through later antiquity and into the Middle Ages, before being dramatically reformulated in the seventeenth century. In watching these debates unfold over the centuries, one sees why epistemology has traditionally been embedded within a much larger sphere of concerns about human nature and the reality of the world we live in. It ultimately becomes clear why epistemology today has become a much narrower and specialized field, concerned with the conditions under which it is true to say, that someone knows something. Based on a series of lectures given at Oxford University, Robert Pasnau's book ranges widely over the history of philosophy, and examines in some detail the rise of science as an autonomous discipline. Ultimately Pasnau argues that we may have no good reasons to suppose ourselves capable of achieving even the most minimal standards for knowledge, and the final chapter concludes with a discussion of faith and hope.

Download or read book The Routledge Handbook of Human Animal Relations in the Byzantine World written by Przemysław Marciniak and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-12-03 with total page 507 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Animals have recently become recognized as significant agents of history as part of the ‘animal turn’ in historical studies. Animals in Byzantium were human companions, a source of entertainment and food – it is small wonder that they made their way into literature and the visual arts. Moreover, humans defined themselves and their activities by referring to non-human animals, either by anthropomorphizing animals (as in the case of the Cat-Mice War) or by animalizing humans and their (un)wanted behaviours. The Routledge Handbook of Human-Animal Relations in the Byzantine World offers an in-depth survey of the relationships between humans and non-human animals in the Byzantine Empire. The contributions included in the volume address both material (zooarchaeology, animals as food, visual representations of animals) and immaterial (semiotics, philosophy) aspects of human-animal coexistence in chapters written by leading experts in their field. This book will appeal to students and scholars alike researching Byzantine social and cultural history, as well as those interested in the history of animals. This book marks an important step in the development of animal studies in Byzantium, filling a gap in the wider research on the history of human-animal relations in the Middle Ages.

Download or read book Primates in History Myth Art and Science written by Cecilia Veracini and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2024-05-15 with total page 794 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Non-human primates (hereafter just primates) play a special role in human societies, especially in regions where modern humans and primates co-exist. Primates feature in myths and legends and in traditional indigenous knowledge. Explorers observed them in the wild and brought them, at great cost, to Europe. There they were valued as pets and for display, their images featured in art and architecture, and where they were literally teased apart by scientists. The international team of contributors to this book draws these different perspectives together to show how primates helped humans better understand their own place in nature. The book will be of interest to undergraduate and graduate students as well scholars in disciplines ranging from anthropology to art history. Key features: Includes contributions from an international team of historians and natural scientists Integrates various perspectives and perceptions of non-human primates across time and place Summarizes the place of non-human primates in science, art and culture Includes rare early illustrations

Download or read book Hume on the Self and Personal Identity written by Dan O'Brien and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-08-30 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book brings together a team of international scholars to attempt to understand David Hume’s conception of the self. The standard interpretation is that he holds a no-self view: we are just bundles of conscious experiences, thoughts and emotions. There is nothing deeper to us, no core, no essence, no soul. In the Appendix to A Treatise of Human Nature, though, Hume admits to being dissatisfied with such an account and Part One of this book explores why this might be so. Part Two turns to Books 2 and 3 of the Treatise, where Hume moves away from the ‘fiction’ of a simple self, to the complex idea we have of our flesh and blood selves, those with emotional lives, practical goals, and social relations with others. In Part Three connections are traced between Hume and Madhyamaka Buddhism, Husserl and the phenomenological tradition, and contemporary cognitive science.

Download or read book Medieval Perceptual Puzzles written by and published by BRILL. This book was released on 2019-11-26 with total page 407 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In our daily lives, we are surrounded by all sorts of things – such as trees, cars, persons, or madeleines – and perception allows us access to them. But what does ‘to perceive’ actually mean? What is it that we perceive? How do we perceive? Do we perceive the same way animals do? Does reason play a role in perception? Such questions occur naturally today. But was it the same in the past, centuries ago? The collected volume tackles this issue by turning to the Latin philosophy of the 13th and 14th centuries. Did medieval thinkers raise the same, or similar, questions as we do with respect to perception? What answers did they provide? What arguments did they make for raising the questions they did, and for the answers they gave to them? The philosophers taken into consideration are, among others, Albert the Great, Roger Bacon, William of Auvergne, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, John Pecham, Richard Rufus, Peter Olivi, Robert Kilwardby, John Buridan, and Jean of Jandun. Contributors are Elena Băltuță, Daniel De Haan, Martin Klein, Andrew LaZella, Lukáš Lička, Mattia Mantovani, André Martin, Dominik Perler, Paolo Rubini, José Filipe Silva, Juhana Toivanen, and Rega Wood.