Much of the material found herein originally appeared in The concept of matter, edited by E. McMullin, which consisted of rev. papers from a conference held at the University of Notre Dame, Sept. 5-9, 1961. Includes bibliographical references and index.

Giordano Bruno's notorious public death in 1600, at the hands of the Inquisition in Rome, marked the transition from Renaissance philosophy to the Scientific Revolution of the seventeenth century. In his philosophical works he addressed such delicate issues as the role of Christ as mediator and the distinction, in human beings, between soul and matter. This volume presents new translations of Cause, Principle and Unity, in which he challenges Aristotelian accounts of causality and spells out the implications of Copernicanism for (...) a new theory of an infinite universe, and of two essays on magic, On Magic and A General Account of Bonding, in which he interprets earlier theories about magical events in the light of the unusual powers of natural phenomena. (shrink)

This volume is devoted St. Thomas's commentary on the Physics. In the Physics, Aristotle delves into what makes things what they are. In commenting on this fundamental text of Aristotelian philosophy, St. Thomas takes Aristotle's thoughts and deepens them.

All but three of the nine essays in this collection are reprinted from elsewhere, with varying degrees of modification. This volume is the thirteenth in the author’s series of similar collections dating back to 1969. The three new essays are entitled, “The.

The fifteen independently written essays in this volume are held together by a recent dispute among some historians of science about the historiographic meaning and validity of the concept of the Scientific Revolution as referring to what happened in Western intellectual culture in the century and a half between Copernicus and Newton. Is that concept a distortion of what actually occurred since as traditionally understood, it reads the past primarily in terms of what science has become today? Or is it (...) fundamentally correct, and important, to maintain that the Scientific Revolution was a unique, one-time event which was a sudden, radical, and complete transformation of the Western world from a religious culture to one based on a mechanistic and reductionistic model of reality? (shrink)