Search Results

In answer to the question ‘will all be saved?’, the final chapter suggests a third possible idea of universalist hope that lies between Gregory's predictive and Rahner's paradoxical ideas of hope. In response to the question ‘how will all be saved?’, it compares the two theologians’ views on how one's current life affects one's destiny with God, focussing on the concepts of philosophia and sunergeia (in Gregory), and decision and immanent/transcendent consummation (in Rahner); their views on freedom are then compared. It is suggested that despite their many differences in expression and content, Gregory and Rahner present an idea of universal salvation that is fundamentally similar, and is genuinely coherent with orthodox Christianity. The chapter concludes that while Gregory's answers to the problems of universalism are sometimes clearer and although his concept of hope is more logical, Rahner's eschatology is more nuanced and has a subtlety that fits better with scientific discoveries about human nature, the mind, and the development of the world. Finally, the differences between Gregory and Rahner are assessed in terms of the development of Christian doctrine and the creative role of the theologian, and some suggestions are made as to the future of the idea of universal salvation.

The 12th-century texts considered in this chapter offers images of Nature which in some respects differ. The Architrenius' Nature perhaps has the widest competence and the greatest moral efficacy, whereas the Natures of the Cosmography and the Anticlaudianus are unable to create the human soul. Whatever the differences and whatever the limitations some of the figures display, the Natures in all these works are trying to work for the good: as agents of creation and procreation, they have their appointed place in the divine plan.

This chapter examines the implications of the socio-genetic and ideological factors that brought about the evolution of Spanish attitudes towards comic fiction for three Spanish writings published between 1596 and 1624. These writings include Alonso Lopez Pinciano's Philosophia antigua poetica, Gaspar Lucas Hidalgo's Dialogos and Tirso de Molina's Cigarrales de Toledo. This chapter suggests that these works were significantly influenced by the new comic ethos in terms of style and content.

Philo wished to present a group of extreme allegorizers as living the bios theoretikos: Jewish men and women living a philosophical lifestyle more excellent than any known in the Graeco-Roman world. In order to understand what Philo may have had to deal with, rhetorically, we need to consider how women appear in the discourse of Graeco-Roman philosophy. This chapter explores what is stated about women philosophers and students of philosophers in an attempt to consider how the women are presented in the texts, including epigraphy and art. The women who are represented allegedly lived from the sixth century BCE to the third century CE.

This chapter discusses the “identity crisis” suffered by philosophers beginning in the 1840s, the decade after Hegel's death. They could no longer define their discipline in the traditional terms widely accepted in the first decades of the nineteenth century. So they began to ask themselves some very hard questions. What is philosophy? What is its purpose? And how does it differ from the empirical sciences? The remainder of the chapter covers the sources of the crisis, Trendelenburg's philosophia perennis, philosophy as critique, Schopenhauer's revival of metaphysics, the rise and fall of the neo-Kantian ideal, Eduard von Hartmann's metaphysics of the sciences, and Wilhelm Dilthey's conception of philosophy as a worldview.

This chapter addresses non-academic uses of philosophia in the fourth century BCE, which provides the background against which one can understand Heraclides' use of the term. It shows how philosophia became a discipline in Plato's Academy only by understanding how the term philosophia was being used elsewhere. The key context comes from the educators Alcidamas, Isocrates, and the author of the Dissoi Logoi. The chapter shows that there is less reason to say that these educators competed over “ownership” of the term philosophos (even if at times they may have) or its true and universal meaning than that they gave varying retrospective reconstructions of the term's usage, differing, for example, in the relative emphases they give to practical teaching over the defensibility of research outcomes. To the extent that the academic view of philosophia “won,” this is not because that view was truer or more convincing, but because the Academy instigated a continued discipline that called itself philosophia more than Alcidamas or Isocrates did, neither of whom appear to have had success or interest in developing the sort of well-populated discipline crucial for maintaining a name.

This chapter confronts the use of philosophia by Heraclides' teacher, Plato. It shows that across his dialogues, Plato treats philosophia as a term in common parlance, and thus that he is, in effect, saving the appearances (of Thucydides and Gorgias, among others) when he presents it as conversations that conduce to virtue and flourishing. The dialogues dramatize or narrate just those conversations. Plato does provide something new, but it is not a new “meaning” of philosophia. It is, rather, a new explanation for the possibility that philosophia-style conversations could actually conduce to their end, human happiness. The epistemological and metaphysical considerations mooted in the dialogues concerning knowledge and universals do not determine what philosophia is (namely, conversations) but how philosophia could actually work (namely, by getting clearer about what is really true). Given how unappealing philosophia has been made out to be, a proponent needs to vindicate this apparently lazy pursuit. The Academy, an institution devoted to this pursuit, needed a defense. Yet, in most of Plato's dialogues, philosophia still refers to person-to-person interactions, not to anything beyond those conversations; philosophia is not yet a discipline, a historically extended, increasingly distributed, and impersonal, concerted enterprise.

The chapter outlines the historical emergence of the philosophy of information (PI). It defines PI as the new philosophical field concerned with (a) the critical investigation of the conceptual nature and basic principles of information, including its dynamics, utilization and sciences; and (b) the elaboration and application of information-theoretic and computational methodologies to philosophical problems. It argues that PI is a mature discipline because it represents an autonomous field of research; it provides an innovative approach to both traditional and new philosophical topics; and it complements other branches of philosophy, by offering a systematic treatment of the conceptual foundations of the world of information and the information society. PI may be approached in two ways, one analytical and the other metaphysical. The chapter ends with the suggestion that PI might be considered a new kind of first philosophy.

This concluding chapter provides a brief discussion of the relevance of this study to the way one might now think about philosophia and the history of philosophy in contemporary discussions of philosophy. Diverse candidates get floated: thinking about thinking, knowing at the deepest and most systematic level, conceptual analysis, concept creation, social critique. This diversity should surprise nobody. If each candidate meaning is offered as the best interpretation of the efforts of practitioners over the discipline's two-and-a-half millennia, or even of practitioners in one's immediate conversational circle, or even of oneself, uncertainty, disagreement, and shifts in emphasis can hardly be avoided. The chapter also argues that the relevance to contemporary discussion of philosophy of an account of the name's coinage and early centuries of use is, if narrow, still important.

This chapter offers comments on a wide variety of Scotian subjects and theories. It considers John Duns Scotus's thought as a central focus and ingredient of a main tradition of Western thought, not as an idiosyncratic -ism or movement. The chapter describes some of the characteristics of Scotus's oeuvre and the dilemma of two types of philosophy, attempting to expound on the deep structure of Scotus's way of thinking by explaining some specific terminological points and by reviewing his explanation of contingency. It also analyses Scotus's philosophical theology of God and looks at the perspective of a philosophia Christiana.

This introductory chapter presents a brief overview of the history of philosophia—the Greek name, and the discipline that it came to name. It shows that, beginning around 500 BCE, the coinage of a “love of wisdom” was met with a wry verbal slight. But a century and a half later, the term is revealed in the maturity of an institution that is continuous with today's departments of philosophy. This phenomenon—accommodating a name-calling name and consolidating a structured group around it—recurs through history, as the cases of the Quakers, Shakers, Freaks, and queer activists illustrate. A norm-policing name, at first distasteful, gets appropriated, facilitates a new and ennobling self-understanding, and then governs a productive and tight-knit social enterprise. The chapter argues that such is the origin of philosophia.

This chapter turns to a fifth-century BCE figure as yet unmentioned, but whose importance to the later understanding of philosophia cannot be underestimated: Socrates. Many scholars believe that Socrates' students inaugurated new thinking about philosophia; presumably Socrates' life, or at least his death, galvanized them to do so. This would be a central ingredient in the recipe for the redemptive story told by Heraclides, a grand-student of Socrates. In fact, at least Xenophon and Plato never or only rarely call Socrates philosophos. This chapter makes this observation in part by focusing on both authors' attitude toward Socrates' connection to Anaxagoras, considered by later historians to be the first to philosophize in Athens, and by focusing on Xenophon's hesitation to use the word philosophos with respect to Socrates.

This chapter proceeds from the belief that Heraclides' Pythagoras story implies a historical account of the development of the discipline of philosophia. It describes the rise of this historiography of philosophy, one that materializes only in the Academy. Aristotle's writings provide the clearest evidence. When in the intellectual-historical mode, Aristotle circumscribes philosophia as an engagement with the ideas of others, living or dead, whom one takes also to be or have been engaged in philosophia. This includes Thales's views, for example, since Aristotle can reconstruct them as addressing certain questions and open to critique by successors, including himself in particular, but not those of Hesiod, Orpheus, or other admittedly wise authors, who are not as amenable to this kind of virtual conversation. Aristotle does not explain his departure from Plato's interpersonal picture of philosophia to a disciplinary one, but the density of conversations, memories, texts, and positions found in the Academy probably prompted his new view. Since progress in philosophy matters, and is possible, one should bring to bear everything of relevance to any possible question, not just the ideas of one's immediate interlocutors.

This chapter focuses on a set of fourth-century BCE cultural attitudes about philosophia different and on average later than those on which Chapter 7 focused. This set serves expressly as context and occasion for the versions of the protreptic story about Pythagoras told by Heraclides and by other fourth-century BCE writers. Positive and negative perceptions of philosophia coexisted. The positive feelings are most strikingly manifest in the Dephic maxim philosophos ginou (“be philosophical”), the existence for which comes from a 1966 discovery in Afghanistan. The negative feelings are best appreciated from fragments of the comic dramatist Alexis, from an anti-philosophical “apotreptic” found in a recently published Oxyrhynchus papyrus, and from apotreptics found in familiar philosophical texts. What becomes clear is that two ideas about philosophia operate simultaneously, one quasi- or fully disciplinary, the other mundanely ethical. Equivocation between these two ideas is prominent in certain parts of Aristotle's Protrepticus and in the Platonic Rival Lovers.

This chapter discusses the first Jewish rejections of Copernicus. It opens with Fernando Cardoso (1604-1683) who was born in born in Portugal and raised as a Catholic, but ended his life living in the ghetto of Verona as a Jew. Cardoso wrote Philosophia libera in which he rejected the Copernican model. After analyzing this book, the chapter discusses Tuviah Cohen and his illustrated Hebrew enclycopedia Ma’aseh Tuviah, published in 1708. Cohen saw himself an iconoclast, willing to break with some, but not all, traditional Jewish teaching about the natural world, and replace it with the latest knowledge being taught in the universities of his time. His book contains the first illustration of the Copenican model in a Hebrew book, but Cohen rejected the model on both scientific and religious grounds, and called Copernicus “the son of Satan.” His book is compared to contemporary Jesuit writings that also rejected Copernicus on both of these grounds. The chapter ends with a comparison of other contemporary Jewish works that discussed Copernicus, Moses Gentili’s Melekhet Mahashevet, and Isaac Lampronti’s Pahad Yizhak.

This paper has two parts. The first focuses on two twentieth-century discussions about Descartes and Leibniz, discussions that reflect two of the central myths of philosophy: that the problems of philosophy are perennial, not contingent; and that we need not read philosophical texts in their historical contexts. Thus philosophers read philosophical texts from the past, locate “perennial problems,” formulate arguments for the texts’ authors in present day philosophical language, and evaluate these arguments in light of contemporary standards. The second part focuses on the substitution of philosophia perennis for the history of philosophy. Most twentieth century philosophers failed to distinguish the characteristics of formal languages from those of natural languages, and tended to treat texts and speech acts indiscriminately. But embodied speech acts are prior to texts and we should see a text as standing in for a speaker. This includes philosophical texts and the “problems” their authors share with their contemporaries.

Chapter 2 is an account of Trendelenburg’s intellectual development from his early years in Eutin until his professorship in Berlin. It discusses the early influences on Trendelenburg and Trendelenburg’s early university days in Kiel, Leipzig and Berlin. Attention is paid to Trendelenburg’s early lectures on philosophy and his evolving critique of Hegel.

Arias Montano’s magnum opus drew from two genres that were vehicles for discussions about the relationship between the revealed Word, the study of nature and the purpose of natural philosophy: hexameral commentaries and Mosaic philosophies. Using several examples of exegesis about the biblical passage on the celestial waters (Gen 1, 7), this chapter illustrates how controversial aspects of natural phenomena were dealt with in the hexameral commentaries of Saint Thomas Aquinas, Saint Basil of Caesarea, Giovanni Pico della Mirandola, Agostino Steuco, Antonio de Honcala, and Luis de León. It shows that the scholastic style employed by most commentators was an effective way to propose some radical cosmological re-conceptualizations which were presented as valid alternatives to prevailing natural philosophical explanations. The chapter then compares this genre to early examples of Mosaic philosophies, in particular an early Spanish exemplar of the genre Francisco Valles de Covarrubias’s Sacra philosophia. Although Arias Montano’s work was ultimately very different from these two genres—he despised scholastic language, for one—he shared with their authors some very influential historical ‘truths’ that undergirded both genres: the concept of Hebrew as the Adamic language, the veracity of the Genesis account and the Mosaic authorship of Genesis.

Christianity blended particularism and universalism more effectively and seems to have begun to win over the masses at the critical moment of crisis in their collective history when a search for spiritual intimacy with the divine power(s) in the heavens was perceived increasingly as a way to prevent the imploding of a world once thought to be imperishable. Porphyry devised a counter-argument to Christian universalism which coincided with two important developments: the Tetrarchy’s revitalization of the traditional cults and the exponential growth of the Church since Gallienus’ peace in A.D. 260. Constantine’s revolution had many things in common with the pro-pagan policies of his predecessors who used religious culture to unify their regimes. The unique success of Christian universalism can be found in the fact that became for increasing numbers of people the best “crisis manager” at a critical moment in the history of both Empire and Church.