THE THEME, "The Intelligibility of Nature," is exceedingly broad. It stretches like a vast domain in which one can only hope to leave a few footprints, some fragile impressions that are all but lost in the expanse. In attempting to understand the natural world, the enterprise that is most familiar to many of us is inherited from the Greeks and their Latin heirs, both classical and mediaeval, and this enterprise continues in our own day in the form of the modern (...) sciences of nature. Nowadays, we are more informed about the knowledge acquired by the Egyptians, Babylonians, and others prior to the Greeks. We are more conscious of the achievements of the Chinese in physics and the Indians in mathematics. And we are more aware of the medical and zoological lore present in oral traditions, such as those of Africa. Moreover, we are only now beginning to appreciate their contributions and their potential for new forms of enquiry, including other ways of approaching nature. The terms in which the topic is here designated, however, are conceived in Greek and expressed in Latin. Nevertheless, even within this cultural tradition of natural enquiry, the topic is quite broad enough. Like a grammarian of old parsing a sentence, I am forced to begin by distinguishing parts of the theme. (shrink)

Questa monografia esamina in modo chiaro e conciso ma rigoroso e articolato le concezioni di tempo ed eternità nella filosofia greca, nella Bibbia e nella Patristica. Mostra come i Cristiani criticassero la nozione stoica di ripetizione infinita di evi in cui rivivono le stesse persone compiendo gli stessi atti, in quanto opposta al progresso morale, e ponessero invece l’eternità metafisica platonica alla fine del tempo storico, come luogo di retribuzione e partecipazione all’eternità divina.

The twentieth century discovered the concept of sacred place largely through the work of Martin Heidegger and Mircea Eliade. Their writings on sacred place respond to the modern manipulation of nature and secularization of space, and so may seem distinctively postmodern, but their work has an important and unacknowledged precedent in the Neoplatonism of Late Antiquity and the early Middle Ages. Sacred Place in Early Medieval Neoplatonism traces the appearance and development of sacred place in the writings of Neoplatonists from (...) the third to ninth centuries, and sets them in the context of present-day debates over place and the sacred. (shrink)

How can the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit be distinct and yet identical? Prompted by the doctrine of the divine Trinity, this question sparked centuries of lively debate. In the current context of renewed interest in Trinitarian theology, Russell L. Friedman provides the first survey of the scholastic discussion of the Trinity in the 100-year period stretching from Thomas Aquinas' earliest works to William Ockham's death. Tracing two central issues - the attempt to explain how the three persons (...) are distinct from each other but identical as God, and the application to the Trinity of a 'psychological model', on which the Son is a mental word or concept, and the Holy Spirit is love - this volume offers a broad overview of Trinitarian thought in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, along with focused studies of the Trinitarian ideas of many of the period's most important theologians. (shrink)

The manuscript tradition of Seneca'sDialoguesconsists of one eleventhcentury manuscript, Ambrosianus C 90 inf., which is the main source for the text, and a ruck of later manuscripts of lesser and disputed worth. There are over a hundred of these, far more than has been supposed.