A collection of late 20th-century scholarship devoted to Thomas Jefferson as a politician, writer, philosopher, Christian and economist.

Thomas Berry presents his vision of cosmology and the relationships in creation. Responses from Donald Senior, Gregory Baum, Margaret Brennan, Stephen Dunn, James Farris, and Brian Swimme round out the insights and create magnetic reading.

The Essays on the Active Powers of Man was Thomas Reid's last major work. It was conceived as part of one large work, intended as a final synoptic statement of his philosophy. The first and larger part was published three years earlier as Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man. These two works are united by Reid's basic philosophy of common sense, which sets out native principles by which the mind operates in both its intellectual and active aspects. The (...) Active Powers shows how these principles are involved in volition, action, and the ability to judge morally. Reid gives an original twist to a libertarian and realist tradition that was prominently represented in eighteenth-century British thought by such thinkers as Samuel Clarke and Richard Price. (shrink)

This is a new (and for the first time complete) edition of a speech about Buddhism by Rudolf Otto from 1913. This speech is his first academic reflexion of his journey around the world and his most detailed explanation of his view on this religion. In the first part of his speech Otto compares Buddhism with Christianity and finds a lot of parallels. In the second part he defines differences between these two religions and proclaims – from a Christian perspective (...) – Christianity as more valuable than Buddhism. The preface puts the speech into its context: Otto’s relationship to and his knowledge of Buddhism (1), the history of publication of this speech (2), Otto’s specific view on Buddhism in comparison to his contemporaries (3), the meaning of this speech in his œuvre (4) and explanations about the edition (5). The editor has the opinion, that this speech is an important transition from Ottos philosophy of religion to his main work The Idea of the Holy. It further is a good example of what Otto means when speaking about the comparison of religions. (shrink)

Thomas S. Kuhn acuno la expresion tension esencial para aludir al conflicto entre las tendencias conservadora y revolucionaria en la ciencia. Estas dan lugar respectivamente a la ciencia normal, que trata de salvar al paradigma dominante de las refutaciones, y a la extraordinaria, que responde a las dificultades sustituyendo las viejas teorias por otras radicalmente novedosas. La actitud adoptada en cada momento no esta dictada por normas de racionalidad, sino por la psicologia y la sociologia de los cientificos y (...) sus comunidades. Al conceder una funcion central a la psicosociologia en la explicacion del desarrollo cientifico, Kuhn creo la alta tension hoy omnipresente entre racionalidad e irracionalidad, objetividad y subjetividad, universalismo y relativismo, realismo e idealismo. Este homenaje a la obra de Kuhn recoge diversas contribuciones a las principales caras de esta tension, desde la perspectiva de la filosofia, la sociologia, la psicologia y la historia de la ciencia. (shrink)

Contemporary Philosophy in Focus offers a series of introductory volumes to many of the dominant philosophical thinkers of the current age. Thomas Kuhn, the author of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, is probably the best-known and most influential historian and philosopher of science of the last 25 years, and has become something of a cultural icon. His concepts of paradigm, paradigm change and incommensurability have changed the way we think about science. This volume offers an introduction to Kuhn's life (...) and work and then considers the implications of Kuhn's work for philosophy, cognitive psychology, social studies of science and feminism. The volume is more than a retrospective on Kuhn, exploring future developments of cognitive and information services along Kuhnian lines. Outside of philosophy the volume will be of particular interest to professionals and students in cognitive science, history of science, science studies and cultural studies. (shrink)

The great medieval philosopher Thomas Aquinas was Dominican regent master in theology at the University of Paris, where he presided over a series of questions - academic debates - on ethical topics. This volume offers translations of disputed questions on the nature of virtues in general, the fundamental or 'cardinal' virtues of practical wisdom, justice, courage, and temperateness, the divinely bestowed virtues of hope and charity, and the practical question of how, when and why one should rebuke a 'brother' (...) for wrongdoing. The introduction explains how Aquinas's theory of virtue fits into his ethics as a whole, and it illuminates Aquinas's views by explaining the institutional and intellectual context in which these disputed questions were debated. (shrink)

This book contains the text of Thomas Kuhn's unfinished book, The Plurality of Worlds: An Evolutionary Theory of Scientific Development, which Kuhn himself described as "a return to the central claims of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, and the problems that it raised but did not resolve." The Plurality of Worlds is preceded by two related texts that Kuhn publicly delivered but never published in English: his paper "Scientific Knowledge as a Historical Product" and his Shearman Memorial Lectures, "The (...) Presence of Past Science." The book opens with an introduction by the editor that describes the origins and structure of The Plurality of Worlds, and sheds light on its central philosophical problems. Kuhn's aims in his last writings are bold. He sets out to develop an empirically grounded theory of meaning that would allow him to make sense of both the possibility of historical understanding and the inevitability of incommensurability between past and present science. Moreover, he intends to show that incommensurability is fully compatible with a robust notion of a real world that science investigates, with the rationality of scientific belief change, and with the idea that scientific development is progressive. This is a must-read follow-up to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, one of the most important books of the twentieth century. (shrink)

This volume offers an English translation of John of St. Thomas's Cursus theologicus I, question I, disputation 2. In this particular text, the Dominican master raises questions concerning the scientific status and nature of theology. At issue, here, are a number of factors: namely, Christianity's continual coming to terms with the "Third Entry" of Aristotelian thought into Western Christian intellectual culture - specifically the Aristotelian notion of 'science' and sacra doctrina's satisfaction of those requirements - the Thomistic-commentary tradition, and (...) the larger backdrop of the Iberian Peninsula's flourishing "Second Scholasticism." In this latter context, John of St. Thomas applies the theological principles of Thomas Aquinas to the Scholastic disputes preoccupying Thomist, Franciscan, and Jesuit theologians, such as Cajetan, Bañez, Luis de Molina, Vazquez, Suárez - to name only a few - in a tour de force of theological thinking throughout the entire period of Scholasticism. In the process - and not insignificantly - the status quaestionis of theology's scientific character is clearly framed and answered according to John's satisfaction. Key to John of St. Thomas's resolution of the question is his understanding of the continuity of the power of human reason with the super-intelligibility of divine revelation spelled out in terms of what he calls "virtual revelation." This text presented in this volume is a quintessential example of the deep and abiding harmony that flourished between faith and reason as well as grace and nature within the golden era of Baroque Scholasticism. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas produced a voluminous body of work on moral theory, and much of that work is on virtue, particularly the status and value of the virtues as principles of virtuous acts, and the way in which a moral life can be organized around them schematically. Thomas Osborne presents Aquinas's account of virtue in its historical, philosophical and theological contexts, to show the reader what Aquinas himself wished to teach about virtue. His discussion makes the complexities of Aquinas's (...) moral thought accessible to readers despite the differences between Thomas's texts themselves, and the distance between our background assumptions and his. The book will be valuable for scholars and students in ethics, medieval philosophy, and theology. (shrink)

Author: Thomas Sören Hoffmann. Translated by Pedro Sepúlveda Zambrano.

i began my “eleatic descartes” with a reminder of, what nobody denies, that Descartes is a convinced mechanist. Therefore, he must, in some sense, recognize motion. No less widely accepted is that Descartes is a plenum theorist. The main argument of the Eleatic interpretation is that given his articulation of the corporeal plenum in part two of the Principles, he cannot recognize motion by conceiving of it as real. And, because motion is what individuates bodies, there cannot be a multiplicity (...) of real bodies. Thus, as far as the material world is concerned, the two Eleatic elements are in place: as for Parmenides, so for Descartes, there is but one thing, and it does not change.For Descartes, that one thing.. (shrink)

Thomas Reid is now recognized as one of the towering figures of the Enlightenment. Best known for his published writings on epistemology and moral theory, he was also an accomplished mathematician and natural philosopher, as an earlier volume of his manuscripts edited by Paul Wood for the Edinburgh Reid Edition, Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation, has shown. The Correspondence of Thomas Reid collects all of the known letters to and from Reid in a fully annotated form. (...) Letters already published by Sir William Hamilton and others have been reedited, and roughly half of the letters included appear in print for the first time. Writing in 1802, Reid's disciple and biographer Dugald Stewart doubted that Reid's correspondence &"would be generally interesting.&" This collection proves otherwise, for the letters illuminate virtually every aspect of Reid's life and career and, in some instances, provide us with invaluable evidence about activities otherwise undocumented in his manuscripts or published works. Through his correspondence we can trace Reid's relations with contemporaries such as David Hume and his colleagues at both King's College, Aberdeen, and the University of Glasgow, as well as his engagement with the most controversial philosophical, scientific, and political issues of his day. If anything, the letters assembled here serve as the starting point for understanding Reid and his place in the Enlightenment. (shrink)

[Robert Stalnaker] Saul Kripke made a convincing case that there are necessary truths that are knowable only a posteriori as well as contingent truths that are knowable a priori. A number of philosophers have used a two-dimensional model semantic apparatus to represent and clarify the phenomena that Kripke pointed to. According to this analysis, statements have truth-conditions in two different ways depending on whether one considers a possible world 'as actual' or 'as counterfactual' in determining the truth-value of the statement (...) relative to that possible world. There are no necessary a posteriori or contingent a priori propositions: rather, contingent a priori and necessary a posteriori statements are statements that are necessary when evaluated one way, and contingent when evaluated the other way. This paper distinguishes two ways that the two-dimensional framework can be interpreted, and argues that one of them gives the better account of what it means to 'consider a world as actual', but that it provides no support for any notion of purely conceptual a priori truth. /// [Thomas Baldwin] Two-dimensional possible world semantic theory suggests that Kripke's examples of the necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori should be handled by interpreting names as implicitly indexical. Like Stalnaker, I reject this account of names and accept that Kripke's examples have to be accommodated within a metasemantic theory. But whereas Stalnaker maintains that a metasemantic approach undermines the conception of a priori truth, I argue that it offers the opportunity to develop a conception of the a priori aspect of stipulations, conceived as linguistic performances. The resulting position accommodates Kripke's examples in a way which is both intrinsically plausible and fits with Kripke's actual discussion of them. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that the problem of the one and the many, as first proposed in the West by Parmenides, can be resolved without recourse to either monism or nominalism by an appeal to distinct though mutually ordered principles of distinction in the realm of material substances, namely that of material individuation, distinction according to form, and supposital distinction. This solution, rooted in St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Albert the Great, maintains that what distinguishes one material substance (...) from any other substance absolutely is the agency of the Divine Intellect. This agency elicits in the created material substance the actuality of the relation of creation, which is the cause or principle that, in inhering in the ens creatum as a property subsisting in it, sustains the material substance in its mode of being as suppositum by formally perfecting its distinction with reference to God the Creator. (shrink)

Thomas Aquinas, John Duns Scotus, and William of Ockham disagree over how and whether virtues are specified by their objects. For Thomas, habits and acts are specified by their formal objects. For instance, the object of theft is something that belongs to someone else, and more particularly theft is distinct from robbery because theft is the open taking of another’s good, whereas robbery is open and violent. A habit such as a virtue or a vice shares or takes (...) the act’s object. For Scotus, although the same virtue or act cannot have objects which differ formally, different virtues and acts can have an object which is identical according to its formal ratio, in the way that the different theological virtues might even formally have God as their object. Ockham accepts Scotus’s view that charity and hope are two kinds of love, we will see how, unlike Scotus, he argues that these theological virtues differ on account of their immediate complex objects. The disagreement between these three figures raises important difficulties concerning what it even means to be a formal object. (shrink)

Il est difficile, après avoir écrit tout un livre sur le thème de la différence sexuelle, d’apporter de nouvelles preuves pour défendre les points de vue qu’Annick Jaulin met en question dans le numéro 14 de CLIO, Histoire, Femmes et Sociétés. Elle a raison d’affirmer que l’usage que je fais de la catégorie de « genre » dans l’examen des sources prémodernes, est confus et peut-être inapproprié. J’ai moi-même essayé de le suggérer autant que faire se peut. Le mot lui- (...) même a longtemps été util... (shrink)

INTRODUCTION Although the writings of Thomas Reid are very fertile and interesting, his life is biographically barren in comparison to such seventeenth - and ...

Although Thomas, Scotus, and Ockham are all broadly Aristotelian, their different Aristotelian accounts reflect underlying disagreements in these three areas. These trends may represent a shift from an earlier to a later medieval intellectual culture, but they also reflect views that continued to exist in different schools. Thomists continued to exist alongside Scotists through the end of the eighteenth century, and Ockham’s views had a more varied but continued influence through the modern period. The different views of Thomas, (...) Scotus, and Ockham are not only in themselves plausible attempts at understanding human action, but they formed the background to late medieval and early modern descriptions of human action. (shrink)

In his Telluris Theoria Sacra and its English translation The Theory of the Earth (1681–90), the English clergyman and schoolmaster Thomas Burnet (c.1635–1715) constructed a geological history from the Creation to the Final Consummation, positing predominantly natural causes to explain biblical events and their effects on the Earth and life on it. Burnet's insistence on appealing primarily to natural rather than miraculous causes has been interpreted both by his contemporaries and by some historians as an essentially Cartesian principle. On (...) this reading, Burnet adhered to a Cartesian style of explanation in which there was no place for miracles. In this paper, I propose a different interpretation. Burnet's commitment to natural over miraculous causes, I argue, was grounded in an anti-voluntarist theology which he inherited from the Cambridge Platonists and Latitudinarians. This anti-voluntarism, moreover, also dictated the kind of miracles to which he did appeal. This reading of Burnet contrasts with the view that he was simply following Cartesian principles. First, Descartes had espoused a radical form of theological voluntarism. Second, Burnet's and Descartes's views of providence were based on distinct attributes of God, and these attributes had quite different implications regarding the place of miracles in the providential order. (shrink)

Reid's ideas on education are a direct development of his theory of the mind, and the writings in this volume form an integral part of his philosophy that has, until now, been ignored.

Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA präsentieren seit ihrer Gründung durch Paul Wilpert im Jahre 1962 Arbeiten des Thomas-Instituts der Universität zu Köln. Das Kernstück der Publikationsreihe bilden die Akten der im zweijährigen Rhythmus stattfindenden Kölner Mediaevistentagungen, die vor über 50 Jahren von Josef Koch, dem Gründungsdirektor des Instituts, ins Leben gerufen wurden. Der interdisziplinäre Charakter dieser Kongresse prägt auch die Tagungsakten: Die MISCELLANEA MEDIAEVALIA versammeln Beiträge aus allen mediävistischen Disziplinen - die mittelalterliche Geschichte, die Philosophie, die Theologie sowie die Kunst- und (...) Literaturwissenschaften sind Teile einer Gesamtbetrachtung des Mittelalters. (shrink)

Thomas Reid saw the three subjects of logic, rhetoric, and the fine arts as closely cohering aspects of one endeavor that he called the culture of the mind. This was a topic on which Reid lectured for many years in Glasgow, and this volume presents as near a reconstruction of these lectures as is now possible. Though virtually unknown today, this material in fact relates closely to Reid's published works and in particular to the late Essays on the Intellectual (...) Powers of Man and Essays on the Active Powers of Man. When composing these works, Reid drew primarily on his lectures on "pneumatology," which presented a theory of the mental powers, broadly conceived. These lectures were basic to the course on the culture of the mind that explained the cultivation of the mental powers. Although the Essays also included some elements from the material on the culture of the mind, the bulk of the latter was left in manuscript form, and Alexander Broadie's edition restores this important extension of Reid's overall work. In addition, this volume continues the attractive combination of manuscript material and published work, in this case Reid's important and well-known essay on Aristotle's logic. This text was corrupted in earlier editions of Reid's works and is now restored to the state in which Reid left it. This volume underscores Reid's great and growing significance, viewed both as a historical figure and as a philosopher. At the same time, it is of great interdisciplinary importance. While the material emerges directly from the core of Reid's philosophy, as now understood, it will appeal widely to people in literary, cultural, historical, and communications studies. In this regard, the present volume is a true fruit of the Scottish Enlightenment. (shrink)

The English cases -- Cases concerning marriage -- Cases concerning ecclesiastical fasts -- Appendix: List of faculties.

Thomas Jefferson is among the most important and controversial of American political thinkers: his influence (libertarian, democratic, participatory, and agrarian-republican) is still felt today. A prolific writer, Jefferson left 18,000 letters, Notes on the State of Virginia, an Autobiography, and numerous other papers. Joyce Appleby and Terence Ball have selected the most important of these for presentation in the Cambridge Texts series: Jefferson's views on topics such as revolution, self-government, the role of women and African-American and Native Americans emerge (...) to give a fascinating insight into a man who owned slaves, yet advocated the abolition of slavery. The texts are supported by a concise introduction, suggestions for further reading and short biographies of key figures, all providing invaluable assistance to the student encountering the breadth and richness of Jefferson's thought for the first time. (shrink)

Thomas More’s Utopia is an iridescent and enigmatic work which evades a consistent interpretation. Throughout the entire dialogue, many contradictory positions are argued for, and More’s play with telling names makes it difficult to determine which person’s position we should embrace. In order to evade these problems, the paper suggests reading More’s work as a philosophical dialogue with the reader, in which More invites us to evaluate the different positions contained in the work against our own back- ground. In (...) this sense, More’s Utopia is a proper piece of philosophy. (shrink)