Panentheism is among the most influential variations on classical theism found within nineteenth and twentieth century theology, a prominent perspective in the recent religion and science dialogue, and is increasing in prominence within analytic philosophy of religion. Existing works on the history of panentheism understandably focus primarily on proponents of the view and their arguments in its favor. Less attention has been given to the history of arguments against it, and in particular little has been written on mediaeval Scholastic critiques. (...) Here, I summarize the criticisms leveled by an important thirteenth-century Franciscan, Alexander of Hales. I also assess the enduring value of his critique, arguing that it helps bring to the fore the importance of panentheism’s link with a further metaphysical debate: that between spacetime relationism versus substantivalism. (shrink)

Very little has been published on the topic of vigilantism within recent applied ethics. Part of this dearth may be due to a perception that the issue lacks historical moorings, with little in the way of precedent in prior philosophical literature. However such a perception would be inaccurate; in fact there are interesting discussions of vigilantism in the history of philosophy. By way of illustration, this article examines an early treatment of the topic by the influential thirteenth-century Franciscan thinker, (...) class='Hi'>Alexander of Hales. Hales’ perspective reflects what would become a fairly general mediaeval consensus against the permissibility of vigilantism. His discussion is interesting on its own account, but the main goal of this study is to help spur further historical inquiries – and perhaps by extension to prompt further interest in vigilantism within current applied ethics. (shrink)

This volume provides a survey of contemporary philosophy of language. As well as providing a synoptic view of the key issues, figures, concepts and debates, each essay makes new and original contributions to ongoing debate.

Appealing to Romans 10:17, Summa Halensis states, "'faith comes from hearing' and preaching is the exterior medium whereby people are instructed and moved to receive grace."1 Given this claim it may come as a surprise to many, that Francis of Assisi did not necessarily understand his propositum vitae to focus on the ministry of preaching. In his musings in the Testament two years before his death in 1226, he claims that the vocation of the brothers was to live according to (...) the form of the holy gospel.2 Even after Innocent III granted permission to him and his fellow paupers from Assisi in 1209 to continue their Gospel experiment and added that they could also preach penance, the exempla of lived experience took... (shrink)

U.S. conservation policy, both in structure and in practice, places a heavy burden on conservationists to halt development projects, rather than on advocates of development to defend their proposed actions. In this paper, we identify this structural phenomenon in several landmark environmental policies and in practice in the contemporary debate concerning oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. The burdens placed on conservation can be understood in terms of constraints—as conservation ‘floors’ and degradation ‘ceilings’. At base, these floors and (...) ceilings emerge out of underlying consequentialist commitments that assume that our environmental activity can be justified by appeal primarily to ends. A series of intuition pumps guides our argument to instead shift the conservation discourse away from these consequentialist commitments to more widely justify activities on our public lands. (shrink)

ABSTRACT Some fear the Anthropocene heralds the end of nature, while others argue that nature will persist throughout the Anthropocene. Still others worry that acknowledging the Anthropocene grants humanity broad license to further inject itself into nature. We propose that this debate rests on a conflation between naturalness and wildness. Where naturalness is best understood as fundamentally a metaphysical category, wildness can be better understood as an inter-relational category. The raccoons in cities, the deer in suburban yards, the coyotes hunting (...) cats and dogs: these all return wildness, where naturalness may have been lost. (shrink)

Anselm’s Cur Deus homo [CDH hereafter] covers a number of topics related to the doctrine of redemption, but its main contribution to that doctrine is its account of how Christ’s death makes satisfaction for human sin. Anselm’s concept of satisfaction is correlated with his understanding of sin. According to Anselm, sin incurs a debt that one pays by making satisfaction. Anselm’s satisfaction theory of the Atonement came to dominate soteriology in the scholastic period. Despite numerous quotations from and references to (...) CDH among thirteenth- and fourteenth-century authors, we find that scholastics differ in how they interpret Anselm’s teaching on Christ’s satisfaction. This study will contribute to our .. (shrink)

In this paper we introduce the 'New Substitution Problem' which, on its face, presents a problem for adaptation proposals that are justified by appeal to obligations of reparation. In contrast to the standard view, which is that obligations of reparation require that one restore lost value, we propose instead that obligations to aid and assist species and ecosystems in adaptation, in particular, follow from a failure to adequately justify - either by absence, neglect, omission or malice - actions that caused, (...) or coalesced to cause, climatic change. Because this position suggests a different reason for reparation - namely, it does not rely on the notion that an obligation to repair is contingent upon a lost good - it permits moving forward with assisted colonisation and migration, but does so without falling subject to the complications of the New Substitution Problem. (shrink)

I consider the well known “manifestation challenge” to semantic realism propounded by Michael Dummett, and further developed by Crispin Wright and Bob Hale. I distinguish between strong and weak versions of the challenge, and show that anti–realists effectively concede that realism can meet the strong version. I then argue that the weak version is unmotivated. Building on work by John McDowell and Peter Strawson, and responding to criticisms from Wright, I argue further that the semantic realist can meet even the (...) weak version. It emerges, inter alia, that there are some serious ambiguities in the standard anti–realist characterisations of semantic realism. (shrink)

Following Smiley’s influential proposal, it has become standard practice to characterise notions of relative necessity in terms of simple strict conditionals. However, Humberstone and others have highlighted various flaws with Smiley’s now standard account of relative necessity. In their recent article, Hale and Leech propose a novel account of relative necessity designed to overcome the problems facing the standard account. Nevertheless, the current article argues that Hale & Leech’s account suffers from its own defects, some of which Hale & Leech (...) are aware of but underplay. To supplement this criticism, the article offers an alternative account of relative necessity which overcomes these defects. This alternative account is developed in a quantified modal propositional logic and is shown model-theoretically to meet several desiderata of an account of relative necessity. (shrink)

Chapter One THE PROBLEM OF BEING IN THE METAPHYSICS TO determine whether the notion of Being in Alexander of Hales is Aristotelian or Platonic, a recent historian seeks his criterion in "the gradual separation of the Aristotelian ...

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:I. The Concept of Beatific EnjoymentThe locus classicus for the medieval scholastic discussion of beatific enjoyment is the first distinction of Book I of Peter Lombard's Sentences. Lombard extracts three distinct formulations of the term "enjoyment" from Augustine's writings. The first formulation is borrowed from the first book of Augustine's treatise On Christian Learning . The formulation states that "to enjoy is to inhere with love in something for (...) its own sake." The other two formulations are taken from Book X of Augustine's work On the Trinity . The first reads as follows: "we enjoy the things that we know, when the will rests, by delighting in them for their own sake." The second says that "to enjoy is to use with gladness , not merely through hope, but already in reality." These truncated statements served as technical definitions of the concept of enjoyment in scholastic Sentences commentaries. It was thought that the definitions call attention to the various psychological factors required for enjoyment to occur. For instance, the theologian Alexander of Hales explains that the definitions reveal distinct aspects of enjoyment with respect to the subject experiencing it and with respect to the object motivating the enjoyment. The expression "to inhere with love" refers to the soul on the part of the subject and to God on the part of the object. The saying "to use with gladness" relates to the power of the soul on the side of the subject and to created beatitude on the side of the object. Finally, the phrase "we enjoy the things that we know" corresponds to the faculty of the will as well as to the uncreated divine persons. Alexander would thus say that an adequate treatment of Augustine's concept of enjoyment must take into account the subject involved in the activity of enjoyment – e.g., the human soul, the faculty of the will, the faculty of cognition, etc. – and the object or objects of an act of enjoyment – created beatitude, the persons of the Trinity, or simply God.A slightly different reading of Augustine's definitions of enjoyment is found in Thomas Aquinas's Sentences commentary. In his literal exposition of the first distinction of Lombard's Sentences, Thomas notes that a perfect definition of a thing must disclose all of its proper causes. He then offers an explanation of the way in which Augustine's three definitions aim to clarify the concept of enjoyment. According to Thomas, the statement "to inhere in something with love for its own sake" portrays the act of enjoyment in relation to the object as a thing worthy for its own sake and the habit of love causing the enjoyment. The second formulation – "we enjoy the things that we know, etc." – links the act of enjoyment with the faculty of cognition required for the activation of the will. The third formulation – "to enjoy is to use with gladness" – refers primarily to the property of delight , which accompanies the obtainment of the desired object and perfects the act of enjoyment. Thomas, thus, identifies three factors contributing to the occurrence of an act of enjoyment – habit, cognition, and delight . In the first article of the first question of his commentary on Book I of the Sentences, Thomas states that enjoyment is the ultimate happiness of a human being. Enjoyment requires the clear intellectual vision of God, it involves an union as well as a sort of a mutual penetration through love between the one who sees and the thing that is seen, and it culminates in supreme delight . Thomas also says that enjoyment is an act of the will manifesting the habit of charity. In his Summa theologiae Ia IIae, Thomas defines enjoyment as an act of the appetitive faculty , and.. (shrink)

Justice is a divine attribute to which the sacred texts of the Abrahamic religions attest frequently and to which people attach great importance. However, it is the express subject of comparatively few contemporary studies. It has been argued that this is symptomatic of a long-standing trend in Christian theology, which has tended to conceive justice narrowly, as retributive. This paper makes the case that, mediaeval theologians, from Anselm to Aquinas, address the divine attribute of justice in depth and with philosophical (...) sophistication, viewing it primarily as God’s merciful and gracious distribution of merits and goods. It seeks to identify Aquinas’s contribution to the mediaeval analysis of this divine attribute and assess what he may have to contribute to current philosophy of religion. In particular, pointing to natural teleology, he offers more fully worked out metaphysical reasons for calling God just and considering all his works just. The existence of creatures can only be explained as an act of divine mercy, with the result that, since existence is the fundamental gift, all God’s works are merciful and just. (shrink)

In the second half of Book One of the Prior Analytics, Aristotle reflects on the application of the formalized logic has developed in the first half, focusing particularly on the non-modal or assertoric syllogistic developed in the first seven chapters. These reflections lead Alexander of Aphrodisias, who was a great exponent of Aristotelianism in the late second century, to explain and sometimes argue against subsequent developments of Aristotle's logic and alternatives and objections to it, ideas associated mainly with his (...) colleague Theophrastus and with the Stoics. The other main topic of this part of the Prior Analytics is the specification of a method for discovering true premises needed to prove a given proposition. Aristotle's presentation is sometimes difficult to follow, and Alexander's discussion is extremely helpful to the uninitiated reader. In his commentary on the final chapter translated in this volume, Alexander provides an insightful account of Aristotle's criticism of Plato's method of division. (shrink)

"Alexander's commentary on Book 1 concerns the definition of Aristotelian syllogistic argument; its resistance to the rival Stoic theory of inference; and the character of inductive inference and of rhetorical argument. Alexander distinguishes inseparable accidents, such as the whiteness of snow, from defining differentiae, such as its being frozen, and considers how these differences fit into the schemes of categories. He speaks of dialectic as a stochastic discipline in which success is to be judged not by victory but (...) by skill in argument. Alexander also investigates the subject of ambiguity, which had been richly developed since Aristotle by the rival Stoic school."--BOOK JACKET. (shrink)

trans. R. W. Sharples. Alexander addresses a number of questions drawn from a range of topics in Aristotle's works.

There has been a great deal of interest in medieval action theory in recent years. Nonetheless, relatively little work has been done on figures prior to the so-called High Middle Ages, and much of what has been done has focused on better-known thinkers, such as Augustine and Anselm. By comparison, Bernard of Clairvaux's treatise, De gratia et libero arbitrio has been neglected. Yet his treatise is quoted widely by such important scholars as Philip the Chancellor, Alexander of Hales, (...) and Albertus Magnus. Some historians of philosophy argue that his writings inspired the voluntarist movement that developed in the 1270s. Thus, Bernard must be seen as an important influence upon later medieval theories of action. In this paper, I examine the basic structure of his interesting account of human action and its freedom and conclude by raising some further issues connected to his work. /// Nos últimos anos assistiu-se a uma retoma do interesse pela teoria medieval da acção. Apesar disso, poucos estudos têm versado sobre os pensadores anteriores à assim chamada Alta Idade Média, para além de que esses estudos se debruçam sobretudo sobre os filósofos mais conhecidos, como é o caso de Agostinho e de Anselmo. Comparativamente, o tratado de S. Bernardo de Claraval, De gratia et libero arbítrio, não tem suscitado muita atenção crítica. Contudo, numerosos pensadores citaram este tratado, entre eles Filipe o Chanceler, Alexandre de Hales, e Alberto Magno. Vários histonadores da filosofia têm avançado a tese de que os escritos de Bernardo influenciaram o movimento voluntarista que se desenvolveu nos anos 1270. Nesse sentido, as ideias de Bernardo de Claraval tiveram um certo impacto sobre as teorias da acção que haveriam de aparecer mais tarde. No presente artigo, a autora examina as ideias do pensador medieval sobre a acção humana e a sua liberdade, terminando com o levantar de algumas novas questões sobre o tratado de Bernardo de Claraval. (shrink)

There has long been a need for a work on the philosophy of beauty treating fundamental problems against the background of the history of aesthetics--ancient and medieval as well as modern and contemporary. This book answers that need with the comprehensive presentations of an objectivist philosophy of beauty to balance the currently popular aesthetic subjectivism. It includes a synopsis of views and theories expressed on the various questions about beauty by philosophers down through the ages. Kovach's acquaintance with relevant literature (...) from the ancient Greeks to twentieth-century authors is staggering. He draws on the observations of thinkers from ancient times--Plato, Aristotle. Philo of Alexandria, Cicero, Plotinus, Augustine, Dionysius the Areopagite, and others; from medieval times--Alexander of Hales, John of la Rochelle, Thomas of York, Bonaventure, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, Dionysius the Carthusian, and others; from modern times--Descartes, J. Addison, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Tolstoi, Santayana, Croce, Maritain, Sartre, H. Read, Thomas Munro, and others. With delicate precision Kovach systematically discusses the philosophy of beauty and the problems it raises. Whether or not one agrees with Kovach's objectivist position, no one in the field can afford to be without this book. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Unibilitas: The Key to Bonaventure’s Understanding of Human NatureThomas M. Osborne Jr.Historians of medieval philosophy have sometimes described St. Bonaventure’s anthropology as dualist or Augustinian. The conventional story runs that the conservative Bonaventure was afraid of contemporary attempts to describe the rational soul as the substantial form of the corporeal body.1 Bonaventure’s relationship to two intellectual trends lends some support to this theory. First, Bonaventure, following Avicebron and (...) class='Hi'>Alexander of Hales, believed in universal hylomorphism, holding that all substances, even the angels and human souls separated from the body, are comprised of matter and form.2 If the human soul apart from the body has its own matter, then in what [End Page 227] sense can the soul be the substantial form of corporeal matter? Second, followers of Bonaventure pointed to this difficulty when they held that the body has its own forma corporeitatis.3 It is not surprising that some historians have regarded Bonaventure as a strong dualist. If the soul is a substance apart from the body, then how can it be one substance with the body? Unibilitasis Bonaventure’s answer to this problem.Bonaventure himself is thoroughly aware that he might seem to regard the soul as a complete substance by itself when he describes it as a composition of form with spiritual matter. If the soul is a composition of form and matter, then it is a hoc aliquid and complete in itself. The soul united with the body could not combine into a third substance.4 I will argue that for Bonaventure unibility is this ability of the soul and body to be united as one substance.In the thirteenth century, unibility describes the ability of two different substances or dispositions to become one supposit.5 For example, Bonaventure and Thomas Aquinas use unibility to describe how Christ’s human nature and his divine nature can be one person. Moreover, John of Rupella, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventure use unibility to describe how the soul and the body form one substance. Most historians, like E. Gilson and E. Weber, have generally described unibility as the attempt to show how one human person can have both a substance which is spiritual and a different substance which is corporeal.6 Unibility is for them a concept which precedes the Thomistic discovery of the soul as the substantial form of the body. If this interpretation [End Page 228] were correct, then it would be difficult to see how Thomas Aquinas could retain the term. In fact, unibility has a variety of uses which depend upon the context of its appearance and the thought of the one who uses it.The unibility of the soul plays a far greater role in the thought of Bonaventure than it does in the thought of Thomas Aquinas. Bonaventure describes unibility as the specific difference between the angels and humans. Unlike Thomas, Bonaventure thinks that humans, like angels, have both a substantial form and spiritual matter. A human being differs from an angel in that a human’s form can also be the substantial form of a body. Since unibility lies at the heart of Bonaventure’s anthropology, it seems strange that it has not been more thoroughly examined and discussed.The four main sections of this paper roughly correspond to the different contexts in which Bonaventure uses unibility to describe a property of the human soul. The first section shows that unibility is the specific difference that distinguishes humans from angels in the genus of intellectual substances. Second, this difference between humans and angels will be elaborated to show how human souls, unlike angels, are not only movers of bodies, but also perfections of their own particular body. The third section argues that since the soul is the perfection of the body, it is also the one substantial form of the body. The fourth section touches on Bonaventure’s discussion of personhood to show that the human soul when separated from the body is not a person because it is not a fully individual substance. Since an angel is not unitable to a human body, it is unlike a human soul in that it does not need... (shrink)

This article argues that Kant’s famous theory of ‘radical evil’, according to which there is a natural propensity for evil as well as good in all human beings, has precedent in the medieval Franciscan intellectual tradition. In the early thirteenth century, members of this tradition, inspired by its founder Alexander of Hales, developed a novel account of free will, according to which the will is capable of choosing between equally legitimate options of good and evil. In affirming this, (...) early Franciscans departed from the longstanding tradition of Augustine, for whom free will can only choose the good, since evil is merely a privation of the good that limits human freedom. By the same token, they anticipated the Kantian contention that freedom entails the ability to choose between good and evil maxims. (shrink)

Alexander's views on universals are, it seems, quite important in the history of western philosophy. When Boethius gives in his second commentary on Porphyry's Isagoge his solution to the problem of universals as he conceived it, he claims to be adopting Alexander's approach. If true, this means that the locus classicus for all western medieval thinkers on this topic is really a rendering of Alexander's teaching. Alexander commented Aristotle’s statement in his On the Soul “The universal (...) animal either is nothing at all or is posterior if it exists”, and this commentary has been translated into Arabic several times in the classical period. In this study the anonymous Arabic translations of Alexander’s commentary has been translated into English. (shrink)

Die Reihe Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca et Byzantina. Series academica wird von der Berlin-Brandenburgischen Akademie der Wissenschaften herausgegeben; sie ist der Reihe Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca et Byzantina. Quellen und Studien koordiniert. Durch die Editionen und Quellensammlungen der Series academica sollen Grundlagen für das Studium der Nachwirkung der peripatetischen Philosophie und zur Erforschung der byzantinischen Philosophie- und Bildungsgeschichte gelegt werden; sie schließt an die von Hermann Diels geleiteten Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca der Königlich Preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften (1882-1909) an. Im (...) Programm der Reihe sind u. a. Editionen von Kommentartexten des Alexander von Aphrodisias, Simplikios, Ioannes Philoponos, Michael von Ephesos, Nikephoros Blemmydes, Georgios Pachymeres, Theodoros Metochites, Georgios Scholarios und Bessarion vorgesehen. Die Reihe steht jedoch auch für Voruntersuchungen zu Editionen und begleitende Abhandlungen offen. Link zu Commentaria in Aristotelem Graeca et Byzantina. Quellen und Studien: https://www.degruyter.com/view/serial/CAGB-B. (shrink)

This article investigates how mid-thirteenth-century theologians grappled with questions of angelic embodiment and corporeal life-functioning. Regent masters such as Alexander of Hales, Richard Fishacre, Richard Rufus of Cornwall, Albertus Magnus, Thomas Aquinas, and Bonaventure variously employed scriptural and patristic sources in conjunction with Aristotelian philosophy to develop a basic metaphysics of angels according to which these inherently incorporeal spiritual creatures assume bodies not on account of any necessity on their part, but rather simply so that we humans might (...) understand their divinely-ordained ministries. Because the relationship between angels and their bodies is strictly occasional and extrinsic, aiming at human instruction, embodied life-functions that are natural to humans are not natural to angels. Rather, angels merely act in anthropomorphic ways in order to fittingly reveal the divine will to human comprehension. (shrink)