Books reviewed in this article: The Anchor Bible Dictionary. Edited by David Noel Freedman with Gary A. Herion, David F. Graf, John David Pleins. The Gospel of Matthew. By Daniel J. Harrington. Paul: An Introduction to his Thought. By C. K. Barrett. A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identiy. By Daniel Boyarin. New Testament Theology. By G. B. Caird, completed and edited by L. D. Hurst. The Fatherhood of God from Origen to Athanasius. By Peter Widdicombe. Dieu et (...) le Christ selon Grégoire de Nysse. By Bernard Pottier. Eucharistic Presence: A Study in the Theology of Disclosure. By Robert Sokolowski. Theological Hermeneutics: Development and Significance. By Werner Jeanrond. Theologie aus Efahrung der Gnade. Annäherungen an Karl Rahner: Edited by Mariano Delgado and Mathias‐Lutz Bachmann. Bernhard Welte's Fundamental Theological Approach to Christology.. By Anthony J. Godzieba. Sacred Identity: Exploring a Theology of the Person. By Jane Kopas. A Salvation Audit. By Colin Grant. Medical Ezhics: Sources Of Catholic Teachings, Second Edition. Edited by Kevin O'Rourke and Philip Boyle. Mission and Conversion: Proselytizing in the Religious History of the Roman Empire. By Martin Goodman. Literacy and Power in the Ancient World. Edited by Alan K. Bowman and Greg Woolf. St Cyril of Alexandria: The Christological Controversy. Its History, Theology and Texts. By John A. McGuckin. Ambrose of Milan: Church and Court in a Christian Capital. By Neil B. McLynn. Basil of Cuesareu. By Philip Rousseau. Augustine. By Mary T. Clark. Irenaeus. By Dennis Minns. Divine Heiress: The Virgin Mary and the Creation of Christian Constantinople. By Vasiliki Limberis. The Irish Tradition in Old English Literature. By Charles D. Wright. Relics, Apocalypse and the Deceils of History: Ademar of Chabannes, 989–1034. By Richard Landes. Huguccio: The Life, Works, and Thought of a Twelfth‐Centuy Jurist. By Wolfgang P. Müller. The Presence of God: A History of Western Christian Mysticism, Volume II: The Growth of Mysticism. By Bernard McGinn. Preaching the Crusades: Mendicant Friars and the Cross in the Thirteenth Century. By Christoph T. Maier. Mary Ward: A World in Contemplation. By Henriette Peters. The Letters of Teilhard de Chardin and Lucile Swan. Edited by Thomas M. King and Mary Wood Gilbert. Pseudo‐Marry: By John Donne. Edited, with an Introduction and Commentary, by Anthony Raspa. Donne and the Politics of Conscience in Early Modern England. By M. L. Brown. The Caroline Captivity of the Church: Charles 1 and the Remoulding of Anglicanism. By Julian Davies. Érudition et religion aux XVIIe et XVIIIe siécles. By Bruno Neveu. Cardinal Lavigerie: Churchman, Prophet and Missionary. By François Renault. Dom Columba Marmion: A Biography By Mark Tierney. Christian Mission in the Twentieth Century. By Timothy Yates. Religion in Africa: Experience and Expression. Edited by Thomas D. Blakely, Walter E. A. van Beek and Dennis Thomson. (shrink)

Timothy B. Noone - The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century - Journal of the History of Philosophy 40:2 Journal of the History of Philosophy 40.2 258-259 Book Review The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century Steven P. Marrone. The Light of Thy Countenance: Science and Knowledge of God in the Thirteenth Century. 2 Vols. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Pp. x + 611. Cloth, $90.00. In this, (...) the most complete study of the tradition of divine illumination ever produced in English, Steven Marrone has set the standard for further studies in thirteenth-century epistemology as well as inaugurated a revival in the historiographical significance of philosophical schools for analyzing medieval thought. He conducts his investigation of thirteenth-century epistemology by focusing upon eleven figures seen as belonging.. (shrink)

While working on various medieval philosophers, I have noticed an affinity between their remarks on the reasonableness of accepting propositions that are not matters of proof and strict deduction and St. John Henry Newman’s remarks that we accept unconditionally and rightly everyday ordinary propositions without calibrating them to demonstrable arguments. In particular, Cardinal Matthew of Aquasparta and Blessed John Duns Scotus both claim there is a sense in which assent to everyday propositions is tantamount to knowledge, even though there is (...) no adequate argumentation or demonstrative reasoning compelling us to assent to such propositions. Newman’s distinction between notional and real apprehension of propositions, notional and real assents, and his insistence on the existence of real assents to propositions that are not necessarily proved, or in some cases provable, seem, at first glance, a case parallel to that of the medieval philosophers we have mentioned. (shrink)

This lecture treats the theme of habitual cognition in both its commonplace and unusual senses in the tradition of ancient and medieval philosophy. Beginning with Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and its teaching on habits, it traces how the ancient and medieval Peripatetic tradition received and developed the idea of habitual knowledge. The lecture then turns to three case-studies in which the notion of habitual knowledge is used in unusual senses: Aquinas’s treatment of self-knowledge; Scotus’s account of human awareness of the concept (...) of being; and Peter Auriol’s observations regarding memory and subconscious awareness in ordinary reptitive acts. Aquinas and Scotus seem to identify habitual knowledge in its unusual sense with the presence of an intelligible in the mind prior to actual cognition of that object. Auriol extends habitual knowledge to cover the cognitive state of someone performing an act without any conscious attention. The uses by both Aquinas and Scotus seem somewhat parallel to the use of habit or pre-conscious knowledge in Hume and Kant. (shrink)

En este artículo el autor examina qué teoría de la voluntad se delinea en el Tractatus de actibus humanis escrito por Juan Iribarne Uraburu. La discusión abierta por Juan Iribarne acerca de la voluntad se sitúa en el contexto de los planteamientos tomistas de la península ibérica en el siglo XVII y manifiesta tanto continuidad como innovación dentro de la tradición escotista. La conclusión que se alcanza es que la teoría de Juan Iribarne muestra desacuerdos fundamentales que distinguen las teorías (...) escotistas respecto de otras teorías escolásticas acerca de la voluntad, sean de corte tomista o suareciano, y, por tanto, es un ejemplo muy instructivo para el actual debate filosófico. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:BOOK REVIEWS 337 Quodlibetal Questions. By WILLIAM OF OcKHAM. Vol. 1 trans. Alfred J. Freddoso and Francis E. Kelley; vol. 2 trans. Alfred J. Freddoso ; pref. Norman Kretzmann. Vol. l of the Yale Library of Medieval Philosophy. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1991. Pp. 391 and 305. $100.00 for both (cloth). In these handsome volumes, Professor Alfred J. Freddoso and the late Professor Frank E. Kelley (...) have provided the scholarly community with an English translation of William of Ockham's Quodlibeta septem (hereafter QS). The volumes constitute the first volume in the new Yale Library of Medieval Philosophy, and both the new series and this first contribution within it will add generously to the growing num· her of medieval philosophical texts available in English. Using the critical edition of Ockham's Latin text established by the Rev. Joseph C. Wey (Opera theologica, vol. 9, Franciscan Institute: St. Bonaventure, NY, 1980) as the basis for their work, the translators offer to readers of English an accurate translation of one of Ockham's mature theological works, treating a wide variety of philosophical and theological topics. Indeed, thanks to their efforts, the broad range of Ockham's thought in natural and revealed theology, ontology, epistemology, and ethics becomes available in English for the first time. The purpose of the Yale series is to translate into English " complete works of philosophical and historical importance". In deciding which work of Ockham to translate for the series, the translators faced two potential hazards: the danger of translating one of Ockham's earlier works that might contain ideas which he subsequently reconsidered; and the danger of translating a work that focused upon a narrow range of topics, something which would give readers the false impression that Ockham's philosophy was concerned only with those topics. The translators have adroitly managed to avoid both of these potential hazards. The translators certainly steered clear of the first hazard by deciding to translate Ockham's QS. These quodlibetal questions are believed to represent the substance of disputations Ockham held at the Franciscan studium in London during the years 1322-1324, although the final written form of the work probably was not established until 1325 or shortly thereafter at Avignon. Hence the QS represent to a large extent Ockham's final word on the topics discussed, since in the period after 1325 up until the time of his death in 1347 Ockham was too heavily embroiled in ecclesiological and political controversies in Avignon and Munich to give much consideration to more speculative concerns. Yet the translators also avoided the second hazard by choos- 338 BOOK REVIEWS ing to translate the QS. True, the QS is akin to numerous other medieval quodlibetal questions in that it treats an array of questions; hut, in the case of Ockham's work, the range of topics is so broad and the issues broached therein so fundamental to his personal thought that one has, in effect, a compendium of Ockham's major philosophical and theological ideas. A brief glance at the table of questions indicates the breadth of the questions and their relevance to perennial philosophical discussions. In the area of philosophical theology, Ockham asks whether it can be proved by natural reason that there is only one God; whether it can be proved by natural reason that God's power is infinite; whether God could have made the world from eternity. In regard to ethical theory, Ockham asks whether the exterior act has its own proper moral goodness, and whether there can be a demonstrative science about morals. In fields of epistemology and the philosophy of mind, Ockham asks whether the human intellect knows its own acts intuitively in this life; whether it knows sensible things intuitively; and whether there can be an intuitive cognition of a non-existent object. Closer to the area of logic and semantics, Ockham raises several questions about the status of propositions and their components: whether a mental proposition is composed of things or concepts; whether mental names are divided into concrete and abstract names in the manner of spoken names; whether the object of a definition is an extra-mental reality or a concept. Finally, readers... (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Universals, logic, and philosophy of mind Ontological reduction Philosophical theology Ethics.

In this book, John Rist aims to give a "fresh perspective" on the entire range of Augustine's thought so that Augustine may speak to us more readily. To the mind of the present reviewer, Rist has indeed succeeded in doing just that, although the contemporary perspective provided is largely one derived from the renewed interest taken by Anglo-American philosophers in the history of ancient and medieval philosophy; within the programmatic limits of such a perspective, the author has accomplished his task (...) masterfully. (shrink)

It has been known for many years that the matrix representation of the one-dimensional position-momentum commutator calculated with the position and momentum matrices in a finite basis is not proportional to the diagonal matrix, contrary to what one expects from the continuous-space commutator. This discrepancy has correctly been ascribed to the incompleteness of any finite basis, but without the details of exactly why this happens. Understanding why the discrepancy occurs requires calculating the position, momentum, and commutator matrix elements in the (...) continuous position basis, in which all are generalized functions. The reason for the discrepancy is revealed by replacing the generalized functions with sequences approaching them as their parameter approaches zero. Besides explaining the discrepancy in the discrete and continuous models, this investigation finds an unusual double-peaked sequence for the Dirac delta function. (shrink)

: This paper examines the way in which climate change's complexity calls forth dialogue on various cross-cultural dimensions which resonate with its multi-dimensional reality. While the IPCC science and the Kyoto Protocol approach this inclusiveness, they ultimately limit the range of voices heard due to the continuation of cultural assumptions that are intertwined with many environmental issues. Following the Earth Charter as an alternative model of cross-cultural dialogue that can inform a methodological approach of climate change, this analysis suggests that (...) a more inclusive sharing can offer a way of attending to limiting assumptions as a means to creating viable regional and global responses. This climatic research etiquette is clarified through focusing upon the continued dominance of economic scarcity and its religious precursor, original sin, in contemporary environmental thought. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:THE ORIGINALITY OF ST. THOMAS'S POSITION ON THE PHILOSOPHERS AND CREATION TIMOTHY B. NOONE The Catholic University ofAmerica Washington, D.C. AS IS WELL KNOWN, Thomas Aquinas stands out from his contemporaries in his apparent willingness to defend the possibility of an eternal but created universe, although, like all orthodox Christian believers, he affirmed that the world had a temporal beginning in the light of Scriptural teaching. That Thomas (...) Aquinas defended the possibility of an eternal creation was amply demonstrated over a decade ago by Fr. John Wippel, who pointed to Aquinas's discussion of creation and endless temporal duration in the De aeternitate mundi, a work written in 12 71 or earlier.1 More recently, Professor Mark Johnson wrote an article in which he concluded that, no matter what doctrine the historical Aristotle may have held, St. Thomas consistently attributes a doctrine of creation to Aristotle.2 Most recent of all have come a pair of important studies by Wilks and Macintosh defending the coherence of Thomas's claim that the 1 John F. Wippel, "Did Thomas Aquinas Defend the Possibility of an Eternally Created World? (The De aeternitate mundi Revisited)," The Journal of the History of Philosophy 19 (1981): 21-37; on the date for Aquinas's De aeternitate mundi, see James A. Weisheipl, "The Date and Context for Aquinas' De aeternitate mundi," in Lloyd P. Gerson, ed., Graceful Reason: Essays in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy Presented to Joseph Owens, C.S.S.R., Papers in Medieval Studies, 4 (Toronto: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies, 1983), 270. Arguments for an earlier dating can be found in Thomas Bukowski, "An Early Dating for Aquinas' De aeternitate mundi," Gregorianum 51 (1970): 277-303 and more recently, "Understanding St. Thomas on the Eternity of the World: Help from Giles of Rome?" Recherches de theologie ancienne et medievale 58 (1991): 113-25. The main thesis of this paper is unaffected by the dating of the De aeternitate mundi. 2 Mark F. Johnson, "Did St. Thomas Attribute a Doctrine of Creation to Aristotle?" The New Scholasticism 63 (1989): 129-55. 275 276 TIMOTHY B. NOONE world could be both eternal and created, while another pair of studies by Aersten and van Veldhuijsen have begun to explore from a more historical perspective the importance of Aquinas's formulation of the doctrine of creation for understanding his thought and its distinctiveness.3 The present paper is intended not so much to challenge the conclusions of any of these admirable studies as to put their findings into a wider historical framework through which we may hope to discover what is unique in Aquinas's doctrine of creation. In reading the Scriptum super Sententias of Thomas Aquinas, one is immediately struck by the novelty of Aquinas's claim that the philosophers and thus reason itself may reach the conclusion that the world is created. Such a claim seems quite different from the account of the philosophical knowledge of creation given by several of St. Thomas's immediate predecessors and contemporaries. What, then, emboldens Aquinas to make such a claim? Is Aquinas's reading of the philosophers so original and so superior to that of his contemporaries that he is capable of seeing in the philosophers a doctrine of creation that they missed? Or does Aquinas's originality on the philosophical demonstrability of creation have more to do with a reformulation of the doctrine of creation? Or does Aquinas both have an original interpretation of the philosophers and a different understanding of the doctrine of creation? In an attempt to answer these questions, the present paper will survey early and mid-thirteenth century views on the philosophers and the doctrine of creation and compare those views to Aquinas's position in the Scriptum super Sententias. The thirteenth-century authors included in this survey are chosen for their prominence in thirteenth-century thought, not 3 See Ian Wilks, "Aquinas on the Past Possibility of the World's Having Existed Forever," The Review of Metaphysics 48 (1994): 299-329; J. J. Macintosh, "St. Thomas and the Traversal of the Infinite," The American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 68 (1994): 157-77; J. A. Aertsen, "The Eternity of the World: The Believing... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:LaudatioTimothy B. Noone (bio)On Sunday, July 26, 2009, the Franciscan Institute was pleased to award to Dr. Girard J. Etzkorn its 22nd Franciscan Institute Medal in recognition of a lifetime of scholarship, editing and publication of texts on medieval philosophy and theology, with a special emphasis on the Franciscan intellectual tradition. The ceremony was held in the Trustees Room of Doyle Hall on the campus of St. Bonaventure University (...) and attended by over 100 scholars, students, friends and members of Dr. Etzkorn's extended families. The award ceremony began with a personal appreciation by Dr. Thomas Shannon, Ph.D., emeritus of the Worcester Polytechnic Institute (Worcester, MA), former member during the 1960s with Dr. Etzkorn of the Sacred Heart Province of Friars Minor (St. Louis, MO). It was followed by the formal laudatio of the honorée presented by former colleague and friend, Dr. Timothy B. Noone, Ph.D., of the Catholic University of America, the text of which is printed here. The event concluded with personal remarks by Dr. Etzkorn on his life as a scholar of the Franciscan tradition."Let us praise men of renown and our fathers in their generation." Sirach 44:1The wisdom of Sirach, the last of the Solomonic books of the Old Testament, would seem an appropriate place to begin this evening's festivities. No doubt, Gerry is squirming a bit in his chair, thinking in his customary humility that the words of Sirach are a bit too high for him. But we must learn to acknowledge what is true and great wherever it is, even when (or to put the matter correctly, especially when) the truth and greatness are found in ourselves. So there will be [End Page 259] no holding back on the present occasion, since the text from Sirach points out our path.We should start with a brief sketch of Gerry's life. Born in Kirkwood, Missouri in 1927, Gerry received his primary and secondary education in Missouri before attending the University of Dayton in the fall of 1944. After three semesters studying chemical engineering, he was drafted into the military, serving in the U.S. Army as part of the occupation forces of Japan after the surrender of August, 1945. This seeming irrelevancy actually became quite important in Gerry's life, for it was during his service in Japan that he encountered the Franciscans and decided to enter the Order after returning to the U.S. Once he had completed his degrees in philosophy and theology and been ordained, Gerry was sent to the University of Louvain, where he took his doctorate, producing a thesis that contained a partial edition of Roger Marston's hitherto unpublished Quodlibetal questions.This work at Louvain presaged in many ways the bulk of Gerry's work: he edited and studied a Franciscan medieval text from Latin manuscripts and studied its philosophical and theological doctrines. After returning from Louvain, Gerry taught for ten years at Quincy College and Seminary before leaving the Franciscans in 1971. But the Franciscans and he were far from being through with each other. Within two years Gerry arrived here to work with Fr. Gedeon Gàl on the Ockham Edition, then in the throes of its labors. Initially working as an Associate Editor on the Ockham Edition, Gerry eventually became Chief Editor of the Scotus Project, the successor project at the Institute to the Ockham Edition.During his twenty-two years at the Institute, Gerry kept up a steady pace of editions, some connected with the Institute's research projects and others springing from his own interests. Among the former, we must note three volumes of the Opera theologica of Ockham and four volumes of the Opera philosophica of Scotus; among the latter, we find the complete edition of Roger Marston's Quodlibetal questions, the edition of John Peckham's Quodlibetal questions, numerous articles containing briefer editions of lesser figures, and a volume of manuscript descriptions, analyzing manuscripts never before described in the Vatican Library. [End Page 260]What I have mentioned so far would be enough for any one human being within the scope of one lifetime. But God had more in store for Gerry... (shrink)

In this remarkable book, Jorge Gracia has assembled a rich collection of essays treating the problem of individuation in what is perhaps its most critical period in the history of philosophy. Each of the essays is devoted to a particular philosopher or group of philosophers whose work is chosen for consideration either for its originality or its influence on the development of theories of individuation; all but a few of the essays are authored by scholars who are the leading experts (...) on the subjects considered in their essays. The entire collection of essays is, moreover, prefaced with a masterful and succinct introduction to the problem of individuation, crafted by Gracia himself, which provides the reader unfamiliar with the problem of individuation a conceptual framework for approaching the study of the philosophers surveyed in the book. It is, indeed, a book which unites both historical scholarship and philosophical acumen so as to provide readers with "an introductory, selective account of the major developments in the period". (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Institutional setting Curriculum.

In this article, I argue that St. Bonaventure’s account of angelic natural knowledge of singulars is a remote source for the doctrine of intuitive cognition as this doctrine is later articulated in the writings of John Duns Scotus and his contemporaries. The article begins by reminding the reader of the essential elementsof intuitive cognition, then surveys the treatment of angelic knowledge in Bonaventure’s predecessors and contemporaries, and ends with an analysis ofBonaventure’s own teaching. The point on which Bonaventure anticipates Scotus’s (...) teaching is his insistence that angels know truths about singulars by directlycognizing the existence and presence of singulars without receiving any species in the direct cognitive act. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century by Bonnie KentTimothy B. NooneBonnie Kent. Virtues of the Will: The Transformation of Ethics in the Late Thirteenth Century. Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 1995. Pp. viii + 270. Cloth, $44.95.In this admirably written study, Bonnie Kent presents researchers on medieval philosophy with a survey of moral psychology during the crucial period (...) between the death of Thomas Aquinas and the summit of Duns Scotus’s career in the first decade of the fourteenth century. Although there have been many studies of particular issues in particular thinkers during this period and a generous presentation of texts with commentary by the great Dom Lottin (Psychologie et morale aux XIIe et XIIIe siècles, 7 vols. Louvain, 1942–1954), there has not been any lengthy study to date devoted to the period of the late thirteenth century that focused on moral psychology and the will. Simply in drawing attention to this period in the history of moral psychology, Professor Kent has made a tremendous contribution to the study of medieval philosophy, since she has rendered accessible authors that are more often than not neglected and overlooked. Kent, in fact, attempts something more: she places her study in the framework of the general historiography of Scholastic thought and the more recent interest in medieval ethics prompted by those championing virtue ethics.In order to highlight the distinguishing features of recent studies on medieval ethical thought, Kent reviews the established interpretation of philosophy in the thirteenth century. In the opening chapter, entitled “Heroes and Histories,” she points out the features common to the scholarly approaches of Gilson, Van Steenberghen, and even Copleston: (1) a prominent role is assigned to schools and movements, especially Aristotelianism and Augustinianism; (2) metaphysics and epistemology are the primary objects of study along with the relation between philosophy and theology; and (3) the Thomistic point of view is the organizing principle for telling the drama of the period. The last feature means that the history of the period is fundamentally told as streams of influence leading to Aquinas, followed by the golden age of Aquinas and his contemporaries and succeeded by a gradual decline after Aquinas, leading to the demise of Scholastic thought. In the context of the established historiography, accordingly, the approach of Alasdair MacIntyre represents a restatement of the common view, but one more radical in form. Instead of being merely different schools or movements, Augustinianism and Aristotelianism are different worldviews with their own paradigmatic conceptions of rationality, each of which is subsumed into the higher synthesis of Thomism. According to MacIntyre, the passage to modernity is begun by Scotus whose innovative theses in moral psychology and ethics are considered revolutionary.Kent’s stated aim is to challenge the “standard story” found in Gilson and others as well as its revised version in MacIntyre’s writings by providing a detailed study of the [End Page 462] period just prior to Scotus and establishing precisely how revolutionary Scotus’s teachings were when compared to his immediate predecessors. She accomplishes this aim masterfully in a series of chapters dedicated to the sources of medieval thought and elements of moral psychology. Beginning with late thirteenth-century thinkers’ attitude toward Aristotle in her second chapter, she shows in considerable detail that there is little evidence for any serious anti-Aristotelianism in the vast majority of late thirteenth-century authors. Indeed, the posture of these thinkers was to separate Aristotle from radical Aristotelianism and Thomism in order to claim that ancient wisdom was on the side of Christian ethics and psychology. The only exception that Kent finds to this widespread attitude is in the writings of Peter John Olivi whose hostility to pagan philosophy is clearly evident.The focus in the next chapter is on ethical voluntarism, a position characterized by the endorsement of the superiority of will over reason, the claim that human freedom resides primarily in the faculty of the will, that the will can act contrary to reason’s judgment, and that the will, not the intellect, commands the lower powers of the soul. In detailing the advent of... (shrink)

In this second revised edition of his now classic history of thirteenth-century philosophy, the late Canon Van Steenberghen has given philosophers and historians of philosophy a masterful restatement of his fundamental outlook on thirteenth-century philosophy. Drawing upon the research of a lifetime and fully cognizant of recent contributions to the field, Van Steenberghen defends in a combative and engaging style the soundness of his interpretations and his historical categorizations, while tracing the development of thirteenth-century thought in a series of chapters (...) devoted to its chief figures and movements. Although one may question his method of organizing parts of thirteenth-century philosophy or his reading of a given philosophical author or movement, the erudition of the author, prominently displayed in his command of the primary and secondary literature bearing on each topic treated, is probably unmatched by any living historian of medieval philosophy. (shrink)

It is my pleasure to present here ten essays devoted to one of the greatest of medieval philosophers, St. Bonaventure. Quite often, Bonaventure is mentioned prominently within histories of medieval philosophy only to be subsequently ignored; his thought is usually deemed too mystical or theological for serious philosophical reflection and analysis. I am happy to say that the present collection shows Bonaventure’s thought as engaging worthwhile issues both in the medieval and in the contemporary context. I hope that this collection (...) may pique interest in the thought of the Seraphic Doctor, whose writings are now being translated into most modern languages, including English. But since the life and writings of Bonaventure are frequently not as familiar as those of his exact contemporary St. Thomas Aquinas, a brief overview of his life and writings are also in order prior to an overview of the essays presented here. (shrink)