This book presents a comprehensive, accessible survey of Western philosophy of music from Pythagoras to the present. Its narrative traces themes and schools through history, in a sequence of five chapters that survey the ancient, medieval, early modern, modern and contemporary periods. Its wide-ranging coverage includes medieval Islamic thinkers, Continental and analytic thinkers, and neglected female thinkers such as Vernon Lee (Violet Paget). All aspects of the philosophy of music are discussed, including music and the cosmos, (...) music's value, music's relation to the other arts, the problem of opera, the origins of musical genius, music's emotional impact, the moral effects of music, the ontology of musical works, and the relevance of music's historical context. The volume will be valuable for students and scholars in philosophy and musicology, and all who are interested in the ways in which philosophers throughout history have thought about music. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Das Mittelalter Jahrgang: 22 Heft: 1 Seiten: 93-114.

The academic History of Philosophy in Lithuania in three volumes will be published by the Institute of Culture, Philosophy and Art. The first presented volume covers the development of Lithuanian philosophy from the 16th to the 18th centuries. It includes late medieval and Renaissance philosophy, the second scholasticism and modern philosophy. The first Lithuanians to be introduced to philosophy were young members of the gentry who studied in European universities at the end of the 14th century. The recently (...) baptized Lithuania strove to adopt Western culture and to present itself as a Western state. Some graduated from the universities as bachelors or masters of philosophy and returned to their country. At the end of the 14th century, Vilnius Cathedral School was founded. The elements of logic were probably taught there. The growth of the political and economic power of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania brought about the need for higher education. That need was significantly increased by the growing activity of various religious orders. In 1507 the Dominicans started teaching philosophy and theology to their novices. They were able to teach late medieval philosophy in its thomistic interpretation. We can regard 1507 as the year Lithuania benefited form a new phenomenon, professional philosophy, and the Dominicans as its initiators. They taught not only the disciplines of late medieval philosophy but also the basics of the other sciences. The Dominicans, and later the Jesuits, Franciscans, Bernardines, Carmelites, Trinitarians and other monastic orders, enriched intellectual life in Lithuania by teaching philosophy in their schools. (shrink)

The academic History of Philosophy in Lithuania in three volumes will be published by the Institute of Culture, Philosophy and Art. The first presented volume covers the development of Lithuanian philosophy from the 16th to the 18th centuries. It includes late medieval and Renaissance philosophy, the second scholasticism and modern philosophy. The first Lithuanians to be introduced to philosophy were young members of the gentry who studied in European universities at the end of the 14th century. The recently (...) baptized Lithuania strove to adopt Western culture and to present itself as a Western state. Some graduated from the universities as bachelors or masters of philosophy and returned to their country. At the end of the 14th century, Vilnius Cathedral School was founded. The elements of logic were probably taught there. The growth of the political and economic power of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania brought about the need for higher education. That need was significantly increased by the growing activity of various religious orders. In 1507 the Dominicans started teaching philosophy and theology to their novices. They were able to teach late medieval philosophy in its thomistic interpretation. We can regard 1507 as the year Lithuania benefited form a new phenomenon, professional philosophy, and the Dominicans as its initiators. They taught not only the disciplines of late medieval philosophy but also the basics of the other sciences. The Dominicans, and later the Jesuits, Franciscans, Bernardines, Carmelites, Trinitarians and other monastic orders, enriched intellectual life in Lithuania by teaching philosophy in their schools. (shrink)

The animation industry of China has developed windingly almost 50 years in 20 century, finally obtained the eruption -like growth in the beginning 21st century. Talent cultivation is one of the important elements of Chinese Animation industry, thus animation education also obtained the stimulation. More and more fine art schools began to have animation program after 2000. This paper studies a brief history of animation professionals in Fine Art Schools of China, and the relationship between fine art (...) schools and animation subject. However the number of schools expanded, but the quantity cannot guarantee quality of education, most Fine art schools are relying on the University-Industry Collaboration teaching mode, but in the fact beneath the brilliant achievements, fine art schools need to sum up teaching experience and education theory different from animation industry. The period of Animation program expanding in Fine Art Schools is almost over, but the period for education quality is coming. How to improve the animation education quality become the most important situation to all Fine Art Schools have animation program. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Abraham, Planter of Mathematics":Histories of Mathematics and Astrology in Early Modern EuropeNicholas PopperFrancis Bacon's 1605 Advancement of Learning proposed to dedicatee James I a massive reorganization of the institutions, goals, and methods of generating and transmitting knowledge. The numerous defects crippling the contemporary educational regime, Bacon claimed, should be addressed by strengthening emphasis on philosophy and natural knowledge. To that end, university positions were to be created devoted to (...) "Artes and Sciences at large," rather than to the professions. High salaries would render lecturers "able and sufficient," undistracted from their task. Most famously, he argued that teaching of the "operatiue studie of many Scyences" should involve sophisticated technical education. The study of natural philosophy demanded not only books, but globes, astrolabes, and other "instrumentals." Most significantly, yielding reliable and meaningful knowledge from experiential gleanings required a rigorous system of deductive reasoning.The legacy of this colossal proposal has earned Bacon honored status as devisor of the scientific method.1 But Bacon's educational reform extended [End Page 87] beyond the methods of producing and transmitting knowledge. To facilitate more efficient "vse and administration" of the knowledge produced by his system, he also demanded a searching examination of the history of learning. This history would provide a mirror enabling his contemporaries to deploy the fruits of his method, by considering how learning in the past had been used successfully or ill-advisedly. Producing this history was the ambition of the Advancement, for he explained: "no man hath propounded to himselfe the generall state of learning to bee described and represented from age to age, as many have done the works of Nature, & the State civile and Ecclesiastical." He continued:And yet I am not ignorant that in divers particular sciences, as of the Iurisconsults, the Mathematicians, the Rhetoricians, the Philosophers, there are set down some smal memorials of the Schooles, Authors, and Bookes: and so likewise some barren relations touching the Invention of Arts, or usages. But a iust story of learning, containing the Antiquities and Originalls of Knowledges, & their Sects; their Inventions, their Traditions; their diverse Administrations and Managings; their Flourishings, their Oppositions, Decayes, Depressions, Oblivions, Removes, with the causes, and occasions of them, and all other events concerning learning, throughout the ages of the world; I may truly affirme to be wanting.2Bacon thus positioned himself not only as a Father of Modern Science, but also a Father of the History of Science.Following Bacon's suggestion, I will examine the "small memorials" of the history of mathematics—and particularly the mathematical art of astrology—in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. My conclusion, however, will not bear out Bacon's claims. Despite his frustration, Bacon was only one of many early modern scholars appraising the role of mathematics within history. And he devoted less energy than others to mapping its origins and tracing its transmissions between communities. In fact, Bacon's 1605 proposal for a history of mathematics was already out-of-date. Discussions [End Page 88] of the history of mathematics had been rife on the continent and in England throughout the previous century.3The evidence that Renaissance scholars inherited was sprawling and inconclusive. Several genealogies for mathematics could be found within classical Greek, Latin, and patristic references. One lineage claimed mathematics began in ancient Assyria, where the priestly caste, the Chaldeans, practiced a form of mathematics that seemed a corrupt admixture of philosophy, medicine, and religion, and relied heavily on observation of the heavens. Other scholars traced the origins to Egypt, claiming that the field developed to survey lands frequently flooded by the Nile. The real problem for ancient, late antique, and medieval scholars had not been the origins of mathematics, but what exactly mathematics were. For some, the term strictly referred to the quadrivium: geometry, arithmetic, astronomy, and music. But for others, mathematics' origins amongst the Egyptians or Chaldeans inextricably linked it to forms of astrological divination, augury, and necromancy that were unsavory to both Latin and Christian traditions. Mathematici were included alongside ghastly lists of Magi, Brahmins, Aruspices, Genethliaci, and other diabolic practitioners of idolatrous magic. These might or might not be distinguished from mathematici such as Pythagoras... (shrink)

The analysis of historical literature allows to consider profoundly the development of national culture and science of the 18th-first half of the 20th centuries and the formation and change of different historical concepts. With the analysis of historical periods that are highlighted in the research, general trends in the changing of paradigms about Russian historical development were concluded, which were translated to mass historical consciousness from the beginning of the 18th century up to 1917. The periods were closely connected with (...) the specific political, historical and economic changes in Russian Empire and with the dominance of certain textbooks during this time. The books were selected because of a number of factors: their inclusion to the school curriculum, the number of publications, the equal number of textbooks devoted to different historical periods. For the analysis were used 19 textbooks, schoolbooks for different courses of secondary schools and primary schools. All the sources of educational literature were grouped into two concepts - officially-state and the liberal. Each publication was highlighted the dominant concept as a base for the whole textbook. There is also a characteristic of the concepts that are presented chronologically. The analysis represents school history books as an important source for the formation of state policy in the representing of Russian history, and, that is more important, for creation of the concept of the state of Russian history. (shrink)

Written by a team of distinguished scholars, this is an authoritative and comprehensive history of Western philosophy from its earliest beginnings to the present day. Illustrated with over 150 color and black-and-white pictures, chosen to illuminate and complement the text, this lively and readable work is an ideal introduction to philosophy for anyone interested in the history of ideas. From Plato's Republic and St. Augustine's Confessions through Marx's Capital and Sartre's Being and Nothingness, the extraordinary philosophical dialogue between (...) great Western minds has flourished unabated through the ages. Dazzling in its genius and breadth, the long line of European and American intellectual discourse tells a remarkable story--a quest for truth and wisdom that continues to shape our most basic ideas about human nature and the world around us. That quest is brilliantly brought to life in The Oxford History of Western Philosophy. With spectacular illustrations--including sixteen pages of full-color plates--this splendidly written volume takes the reader on a magnificient chronological tour through the revolutions of thought that have forged the Western philosophical tradition from ancient times to the present. Throughout, the six contributors--an internationally renowned team of philosophers including Roger Scruton, Anthony Quinton, and Anthony Kenny--bring the astonishingly diverse, wide-ranging landscape of intellectual history into sharp focus, emphasizing how notions seen today as part of an inevitable march of ideas were in their own time often considered radical, if not revolutionary. Thus we are treated, for example, to lively accounts of how Plato's "theory of forms" and Aristotle's pioneering exercises in logic broke with the past to irrevocably alter the course of Western thought. The authors also reveal the relationships between landmark thinkers, and the ways they drew on their intellectual heritage. They show, for instance, how St. Augustine and Aquinas, though advancing the cause of Christian doctrine, picked up where their pagan Greek forebears had left off. We witness how, during the Renaissance, the profound empiricist ideas underlying Descarte's famous utterance--"I think, therefore I exist"--lived in a tense but complementary relationship with Locke's rationalist theories. Moving into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the book explores how Hume greatly influenced Kant's conception of the "transcendental aesthetic," and how Hegel drew upon the lesser known (but groundbreaking) work of Fichte and Schelling. The authors bring the story up to our own time, vividly recounting the existential trend from Nietzsche ("God is dead") to Sartre, along with other increasingly fractious schools of thought. Along the way, we not only encounter the vast intellectual riches of the Western mind, but we also meet the personalities behind the great thoughts, from the saintly Hume (described by Adam Smith as having "come as near to perfection as anybody could") to the ill-mannered outcast Fichte. And the hundreds of maps and striking illustrations (including full-color reproductions of art ranging from medieval manuscripts to the works of Raphael, Ingres, and Magritte) form an integral part of the book, revealing the interweaving of art and ideas through the ages, as artists have striven to give visual immediacy to philosophical concepts. The Oxford History of Western Philosophy is the most authoritative single-volume account ever written for the general reader. Engagingly written and astonishingly far-reaching, it provides the consummate introduction to the intellectual bedrock upon which Western civilization is built. (shrink)

In medieval universities, preaching formed an essential part of the curriculum of theology. Though we know next to nothing about how the subject was formally taught and studied, we are well informed about its requirement and exercise. As early as the end of the twelfth century Peter the Chanter stated that the graduate in theology had to show proficiency in three areas: in lecturing, disputation, and preaching . How and when in a student's career such preaching was to be (...) done is set out in the statutes of major universities, such as Paris, Oxford, Cambridge, and others. In 1253, for instance, the statutes of Oxford University declared that “no one shall incept in theology in this university unless he has first been regent in the arts …, and unless he has lectured on some book from the biblical canon or a book of the Sentences or Histories, and preached in public before the university.” The three-fold requirement was still in place in the fourteenth century and later: “Those who are about to incept in theology, before they are admitted to inception, must throughout all theology schools oppose in public, preach in public, and read in public some book from the biblical canon or the Sentences.” The times and places of such required public preaching, as well as the order in which theologians would give their public sermons, were all regulated in similar statutes and have been discussed in Hastings Rashdall's history of medieval universities and, with particular focus on Oxford, by A. G. Little and F. Pelster. (shrink)

Until fairly recently, most of the attention of art historians and others in these debates has been paid to differences among the partisans of various disciplinary methodologies, or to the differential benefits of one or another school of thought or theoretical perspective in other areas of the humanities and social sciences as these might arguably apply to questions of art historical practice.1 Yet there has also come about among art historians a renewed interest in the historical origins of the academic (...) discipline itself, and in the relationships of its institutionalization in various countries to the professionalizing of other historical and critical disciplines in the latter part of the nineteenth century. These interests have led increasingly to wider discussion by art historians of the particular nature of disciplinary knowledge, the circumstances and protocols of academic practice, and the relations between the various branches of modern discourse on the visual arts: academic art history, art criticism, aesthetic philosophy, the art market, exhibitions, and musicology.2 What follows does not aim to summarize or characterize these developments but is more simply an attempt to delineate some of the principal characteristics of the discipline as an evidentiary institution in the light of the material conditions of academic practice that arose in the latter half of the nineteenth century in relation to the history of mueological display. In brief, this essay is concerned with the circumstances of art history’s foundations as a systematic and “scientific” practice, and its focus is limited to a single, albeit paradigmatic, American example. 1. An extended discussion of these issues may be found in Donald Preziosi, Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science , pp. 80-121. See also The New Art History, ed. A. L. Rees and Frances Borzello .2. One important sign off these discussions has been a series of “Views and Overviews” of the discipline appearing in The Art Bulletin in recent years, of which the most recent has been perhaps the most extensive and comprehensive: Mieke Bal and Norman Byrson, ”Semiotics and Art History,” The Art Bulletin 73 : 174-208. Donald Preziosi is professor of art history at the University of California, Los Angeles, and, beginning in 1992, at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science and is currently completing a book on the history of museums entitled Framing Modernity. (shrink)

From Plato's Republic and St. Augustine's Confessions through Marx's Capital and Sartre's Being and Nothingness, the extraordinary philosophical dialogue between great Western minds has flourished unabated through the ages. Dazzling in its genius and breadth, the long line of European and American intellectual discourse tells a remarkable story--a quest for truth and wisdom that continues to shape our most basic ideas about human nature and the world around us. That quest is brilliantly brought to life in The Oxford History (...) of Western Philosophy. Featuring hundreds of spectacular illustrations--including sixteen pages of full-color plates--this splendidly written volume takes the reader on a magnificient chronological tour through the revolutions of thought that have forged the Western philosophical tradition from ancient times to the present. Throughout, the six contributors--an internationally renowned team of philosophers including Roger Scruton, Anthony Quinton, and Anthony Kenny--bring the astonishingly diverse, wide-ranging landscape of intellectual history into sharp focus, emphasizing how notions seen today as part of an inevitable march of ideas were in their own time often considered radical, if not revolutionary. Thus we are treated, for example, to lively accounts of how Plato's "theory of forms" and Aristotle's pioneering exercises in logic broke with the past to irrevocably alter the course of Western thought. The authors also reveal the relationships between landmark thinkers, and the ways they drew on their intellectual heritage. They show, for instance, how St. Augustine and Aquinas, though advancing the cause of Christian doctrine, picked up where their pagan Greek forebears had left off. We witness how, during the Renaissance, the profound empiricist ideas underlying Descarte's famous utterance--"I think, therefore I exist"--lived in a tense but complementary relationship with Locke's rationalist theories. Moving into the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the book explores how Hume greatly influenced Kant's conception of the "transcendental aesthetic," and how Hegel drew upon the lesser known (but groundbreaking) work of Fichte and Schelling. The authors bring the story up to our own time, vividly recounting the existential trend from Nietzsche ("God is dead") to Sartre, along with other increasingly fractious schools of thought. Along the way, we not only encounter the vast intellectual riches of the Western mind, but we also meet the personalities behind the great thoughts, from the saintly Hume (described by Adam Smith as having "come as near to perfection as anybody could") to the ill-mannered outcast Fichte. And the hundreds of maps and striking illustrations (including full-color reproductions of art ranging from medieval manuscripts to the works of Raphael, Ingres, and Magritte) form an integral part of the book, revealing the interweaving of art and ideas through the ages, as artists have striven to give visual immediacy to philosophical concepts. The Oxford History of Western Philosophy is the most authoritative single-volume account ever written for the general reader. Engagingly written and astonishingly far-reaching, it provides the consummate introduction to the intellectual bedrock upon which Western civilization is built. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:A Medieval Troubadour Mobilized in the French Resistance *Roy RosensteinIntroduction: The Place of Poetry under VichyRien ne semblait plus anachronique que d’interroger, inter arma, le silence des Muses médiévales....Frank 1In Chantons sous l’occupation André Halimi details how raucously the band played on in wartime Paris. 2 If Vercors in 1941 advocated the practice of silence and Sartre in 1945 maintained that Paris had been dead for the four (...) years of the Nazi occupation, Halimi and others have shown that Parisians [End Page 499] sang, danced, and laughed during the Occupation as never before. 3 Rarely had so many plays been staged, so many movies been produced. 4 While in other Nazi-occupied countries the theaters and restaurants remained closed, thus preserving a modicum of national dignity in defeat, in France the arts thrived and la vie mondaine accelerated its pace. Journalist Henri Amouroux rightly explains how cinema and theater provided more than entertainment and why they were periodically the target of curfews. In these wartime performances a seemingly insignificant phrase could take on a rich contemporary context. Thus a line like “toute la fleur du royaume se trouve en prison” in Montherlant’s La reine morte invariably provoked applause. Whether the text was classical or contemporary in origin, the audience “seized upon all the passages that could be linked to the current situation.” 5 In this broad sense, Resistance literature came to include any “poetry written and/or distributed in France during the Occupation, and which the reader sees as implicitly or explicitly conveying hostility to Nazism and Collaboration.” 6Between 1940 and 1944 French audiences escaped their national misfortunes more through literature than through film and drama combined. “Never, perhaps, had literature played such a momentous part in the daily life of French readers,” wrote the late Henri Peyre in 1945. 7 As is often noted, the intellectual Resistance “fut surtout poétique.” 8 Every page of poetry, past or present, seemed to remind wartime readers of their current circumstances. One young poète résistant is categorical: “Never before had poetry played such a decisive role in history.” 9 Pierre Brunel of the Sorbonne is just as emphatic in confirming [End Page 500] the judgment of contemporary scholars and Resistance fighters alike: “During the war years, French poetry found a singleness of purpose and an audience that it had never enjoyed before.” 10In anticipation of more comprehensive treatments of French Resistance poetry sens large, the present study proposes a necessarily modest and certainly partial approach to the role of poetry in the French Resistance. Following the general groundwork of Seghers, Gaucheron, Higgins, and others, it undertakes to track, if only schematically, the reaction to France’s fall as polarized across three territories—in American exile, in Vichy France, and in German camps—through a focus on one exemplary twelfth-century troubadour. Concurrently with the “nouvelle floraison poétique” hailed by André Rousseaux in 1941, 11 Jaufre Rudel was one earlier poet who enjoyed a resurgence of interest during the war. With respect to this troubadour, to date only Dietmar Rieger has mentioned in passing an oblique reference to Rudel’s trademark distant love in Aragon’s “Pour un chant (national)”: “Jaufre’s love from afar is set against a love for France.” 12 This particular troubadour’s legend and lyrics assumed new dimensions through their immediate relevance not only for Aragon but for all French nationals, both imprisoned at home and exiled abroad. Literary historian René Dumesnil observed as early as 1941 with respect to pre-war French classics: “Present circumstances give them new depth and extend their range.” 13 Regarding France’s medieval literature, a modern critic has noted how “the troubadours, just as much as Tristan, Roland, Lancelot, Perceval, or even Yseult..., emerge as agents of unity, even of unanimity, around whom it is still possible to muster the French people in 1940.” 14 [End Page 501]As has been observed for centuries, “Frenchmen abroad seldom wholly give up the idea of going back to France some time or other.” 15 All French patriots and expatriates, wherever they found themselves after the Armistice in June 1940, whether... (shrink)

In this book, a dozen distinguished scholars in the field of the history of philosophy and science investigate aspects of the commentary tradition on Aristotle's De generatione et corruptione, one of the least studied among Aristotle's treatises in natural philosophy. Many famous thinkers such as Johannes Philoponus, Albert the Great, Thomas Aquinas, John Buridan, Nicole Oresme, Francesco Piccolomini, Jacopo Zabarella, and Galileo Galilei wrote commentaries on it. The distinctive feature of the present book is that it approaches this commentary (...) tradition as a coherent whole, thereby ignoring the usual historiographical distinctions between the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, and the seventeenth century. Frans de Haas and Henk Kubbinga address the Greek commentary tradition on De generatione et corruptione. Simone van Riet's essay is devoted to the Latin version of Avicenna's third treatise of his Kitab al Shifa, which discusses Aristotle's De generatione et corruptione. James Otte traces the intricate history of the identification of the Latin translator of Aristotle's treatise as Burgundio of Pisa. The essay by John Murdoch explores the fortuna of atomistic arguments in the Latin commentary tradition. Jurgen Sarnowsky, Henk Braakhuis, and Stefano Caroti examine various themes in the commentaries that were produced by the so-called Buridan School, that is, John Buridan, Albert of Saxony, Nicholas Oresme, and Marsilius of Inghen. The article by Silvia Donati focuses on the influential commentary by the Expositor, Giles of Rome. The final essay, written by Anita Guerrini, tackles Robert Boyle's attitude in the Origin of Forms and Qualities toward such Aristotelian key concepts as forms, matter, qualities, and mixture. These essays are prefaced by a preliminary survey by Hans Thijssen of Aristotle's text, its Latin translations and its Greek, Arabic and Latin commentaries. (shrink)

Despite the prodigious inventiveness of the Middle Ages, the era is often characterized as deeply suspicious of novelty. But if poets and philosophers urged caution about the new, Patricia Clare Ingham contends, their apprehension was less the result of a blind devotion to tradition than a response to radical expansions of possibility in diverse realms of art and science. Discovery and invention provoked moral questions in the Middle Ages, serving as a means to adjudicate the ethics of invention and opening (...) thorny questions of creativity and desire. The Medieval New concentrates on the preoccupation with newness and novelty in literary, scientific, and religious discourses of the twelfth through sixteenth centuries. Examining a range of evidence, from the writings of Roger Bacon and Geoffrey Chaucer to the letters of Christopher Columbus, and attending to histories of children's toys, the man-made marvels of romance, the utopian aims of alchemists, and the definitional precision of the scholastics, Ingham analyzes the ethical ambivalence with which medieval thinkers approached the category of the new. With its broad reconsideration of what the "newfangled" meant in the Middle Ages, The Medieval New offers an alternative to histories that continue to associate the medieval era with conservation rather than with novelty, its benefits and liabilities. Calling into question present-day assumptions about newness, Ingham's study demonstrates the continued relevance of humanistic inquiry in the so-called traditional disciplines of contemporary scholarship. (shrink)

Contents Acknowledgements vii Illustrations ix Preface xi Further Bibliography of A.C. Crombie xiii 1 Designed in the Mind: Western visions of Science, Nature and Humankind 1 2 The Western Experience of Scientific Objectivity 13 3 Historical Perceptions of Medieval Science 31 4 Robert Grosseteste 39 5 Roger Bacon [with J.D. North] 51 6 Infinite Power and the Laws of Nature: A Medieval Speculation 67 7 Experimental Science and the Rational Artist in Early Modern Europe 89 8 Mathematics and (...) Platonism in the Sixteenth-Century Italian Universities and in Jesuit Educational Policy 115 9 Sources of Galileo Galilei’s Early Natural Philosophy 149 10 The Jesuits and Galileo’s Ideas of Science and of Nature [with A. Carugo] 165 11 Galileo and the Art of Rhetoric [with A. Carugo] 231 12 Galileo Galilei: A Philosophical Symbol 257 13 Alexandre Koyré and Great Britain: Galileo and Mersenne 263 14 Marin Mersenne and the Origins of Language 275 15 Le Corps à la Renaissance: Theories of Perceiver and Perceived in Hearing 291 16 Expectation, Modelling and Assent in the History of Optics: i, Alhazen and the Medieval Tradition; ii, Kepler and Descartes 301 17 Contingent Expectation and Uncertain Choice: Historical Contexts of Arguments from Probabilities 357 18 P.-L. Moreau de Maupertuis, F.R.S. : Précurseur du Transformisme 407 19 The Public and Private Faces of Charles Darwin 429 20 The Language of Science 439 21 Some Historical Questions about Disease 443 22 Historians and the Scientific Revolution 451 23 The Origins of Western Science 465 Appendix to Chapter 10: 479 Sources and Dates of Galileos Writings [with A. Carugo] Pietro Redondi, Galileo eretico [with A. Carugo] Mario Biagioli, Galileo, Courtier Corrections to Science, Optics and Music in Medieval and Early Modern Thought 495 Index 497. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 3-11 [Access article in PDF] A Historical Overview of Art Education in Japan Introduction The stage of art education in Japan that was given its form by "imports" from overseas — mainly Western countries — is now over. Recently, even at international art education conferences and similar venues, a wide range of dynamic presentations and speeches were heard representing Japan's unique perspective. (...) There is, however, a rather long and involved history leading up to this shift.In this essay, I present a general outline and an overview of art education in Japan, by looking back at the transitions this system of education has undergone. My hope is to increase understanding of the unique features of art education in Japan, examining the characteristics ofmodern art education, and determining the form that art education should take in the future. The Birth of Art Education: 1872-1910 Art education in Japan began in 1872 with the promulgation of the "Gakusei" as a formal system for school education. 1 It was in this same year that Germany introduced a similar system, an indication that Japan was more or less in step with advanced Western nations. Moreover, from the end of the Tokugawa shogunate through to the Meiji era (1868-1912), the seeds of Westernization had clearly taken root. Although the term "art education" is used, for many years the emphasis in art education was on drawing.The first curriculum was established at this time. In the context of art education, Kikagaku Keiga Taii [Introduction to Geometrical Line Drawing] (renamed Keiga the following month) was introduced as a compulsory subject in upper elementary grades (students 10 to 13 years of age) at ordinary elementary schools. Keiga referred to a method of copying pictures from a copybook using graph paper — a method that was extremely restrictive and emphasized practicality.By 1887, under the new government's policy, Westernization was being promoted in all aspects of society, including politics and culture. Art education was no exception, as Western style education began to focus on pencil drawings. During this period, a liberal system for issuing and selecting textbooks was in place, and a consequently a large number of art-related texts were issued. The first drawing textbook in Japan was Seiga Shinan [Guide to [End Page 3] Western Pictures] (1871), a translation of "The Illustrated Drawing Book" by English author Robert Scott Burn, with selected figure quotations from"The American Drawing-Book" by American author John G. Chapman. 2 In addition to these texts, many other books on drawing and the natural sciences were quoted. These textbooks adopted a pragmatic approach, using a "progressive method" in which students were taught to draw easy subjects and gradually moved to more difficult ones.The next significant change came in the form of calls for nationalism, as a reaction to the wave of Westernization early in the Meiji period. Educationalcircles underwent a shift toward nationalist education, and the art worldexperienced a resurgence in traditional Japanese art led by the American Ernest Fenollosa and Tenshin Okakura, among others. Reflecting this trend, a large number of brush painting textbooks were written, and an authorization system similar to the one currently in effect was adopted. The ZugaTorishirabe Gakari [the Committee for the Study of Drawing] was launched in 1885, and then reorganized in 1887, at which time it was renamed the Tokyo Fine Arts School (currently the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music). The education offered at this new institution placed a strong emphasis on purely Japanese elements.In 1903, the Elementary School Order was revised and government-designated textbooks were issued. This system remained in force from 1904 until 1947. The debate surrounding pencil drawing and brush painting continued, and two types of texts were issued — a Enpitsuga Tehon [pencil drawing copybook] and a Mohitsuga Tehon [brush painting copybook] — either of which could be used by the instructor. Both copybooks had similar configurations, with copying as the basic theme, and using a progressive study method. Drawing was still an optional subject in ordinary elementary schoolsat the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.3 (2003) 21-40 [Access article in PDF] Unifying the Curriculum with an Art Exhibition:In the American Grain Terry Barrett This is an account of a whole-school faculty designing and teaching a five-month whole-school curriculum based on an exhibit of modern American art, In the American Grain, in a public school in the Pacific Northwest, grades 6-12. This account is a case-study of a successful (...) attempt of teachers, students, and administrators at one school, in one time and place, unifying the whole curriculum by having an art exhibit at the center of learning. The account is given through many voices, especially those of the students in the school who participated in the curriculum, and the teachers who invented it. I served the school as a faculty advisor and thus the telling is in the voice of a participant-observer but I rely heavily on the experiences of the participants and their ways of telling. The students and teachers are unabashedly enthused about what they were able to accomplish in teaching and learning, and are eager to share their experiences with other learningcommunities. This account begins with a short history of the recently founded school and an overview of its curricular mission. It proceeds with students telling about projects they did and their experiences of the curriculum, which evolved around In the American Grain; teachers talking about their experiences with the curriculum; and the founding principal's responses to the curriculum. It ends with my observations and conclusions. I hope that this account might encourage other educators to initiate their own attempts at school reform by placing the arts at the center of the curriculum. The School Vancouver School of Arts and Academics opened in September of 1996 with 525 middle and high school students (grades 6-11 with 12th grade added the following year) in a renovated building originally constructed as a high school in 1928. 2 The school has a new theater, recording studio, rehearsal rooms, and art studios. The school is dedicated to "the dual mission [End Page 21] of academic rigor and artistic excellence," with an evolving curriculum in which all areas of study (math, science, language arts, and social studies) and a full spectrum of arts disciplines (music, theater, dance, moving imagery, literature, and visual arts) are focused around artistic themes taught through interdisciplinary approaches. 3All students attend the school full-time. The mornings are devoted to "academics," subjects that are team-taught to "core groups" of students of combined grades (6-7-8, 9-10, 11-12) and the afternoons consist of three hours of arts instruction in elected classes of mixed-age students. There are four teachers for each core of about 100 students. Teaching and learning is project-based, interdisciplinary, on an art-centered school theme pre-selected for the year by the faculty. In selecting its theme for a year, the faculty follows the state of Washington's pattern for social studies concentrating one year on world history, the next on United States history, and the next on state history. The faculty also privileges an art form for the year: year one is visual arts; year two, music; year three drama; and so forth. Theme-related projects are conducted by students working individually or in small groups of two to three, and are usually teacher-suggested at the junior high level and student-initiated at the senior high level.Students enroll from all areas of the Vancouver school district and neighboring districts. 4 Students and their parents are interviewed and students are selected for the school on the basis of a demonstrated interest in the arts, not on portfolios or auditions, nor on the basis of special designations such as "gifted and talented." Most of the students are from working-class families, and most students graduating from the school go on to college.All faculty members applied to teach at the school, and all have personal interest and expertise in one or more art forms. For example, Mr... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Journal of Aesthetic Education 37.4 (2003) 3-11 [Access article in PDF] A Historical Overview of Art Education in Japan Introduction The stage of art education in Japan that was given its form by "imports" from overseas — mainly Western countries — is now over. Recently, even at international art education conferences and similar venues, a wide range of dynamic presentations and speeches were heard representing Japan's unique perspective. (...) There is, however, a rather long and involved history leading up to this shift.In this essay, I present a general outline and an overview of art education in Japan, by looking back at the transitions this system of education has undergone. My hope is to increase understanding of the unique features of art education in Japan, examining the characteristics ofmodern art education, and determining the form that art education should take in the future. The Birth of Art Education: 1872-1910 Art education in Japan began in 1872 with the promulgation of the "Gakusei" as a formal system for school education. 1 It was in this same year that Germany introduced a similar system, an indication that Japan was more or less in step with advanced Western nations. Moreover, from the end of the Tokugawa shogunate through to the Meiji era (1868-1912), the seeds of Westernization had clearly taken root. Although the term "art education" is used, for many years the emphasis in art education was on drawing.The first curriculum was established at this time. In the context of art education, Kikagaku Keiga Taii [Introduction to Geometrical Line Drawing] (renamed Keiga the following month) was introduced as a compulsory subject in upper elementary grades (students 10 to 13 years of age) at ordinary elementary schools. Keiga referred to a method of copying pictures from a copybook using graph paper — a method that was extremely restrictive and emphasized practicality.By 1887, under the new government's policy, Westernization was being promoted in all aspects of society, including politics and culture. Art education was no exception, as Western style education began to focus on pencil drawings. During this period, a liberal system for issuing and selecting textbooks was in place, and a consequently a large number of art-related texts were issued. The first drawing textbook in Japan was Seiga Shinan [Guide to [End Page 3] Western Pictures] (1871), a translation of "The Illustrated Drawing Book" by English author Robert Scott Burn, with selected figure quotations from"The American Drawing-Book" by American author John G. Chapman. 2 In addition to these texts, many other books on drawing and the natural sciences were quoted. These textbooks adopted a pragmatic approach, using a "progressive method" in which students were taught to draw easy subjects and gradually moved to more difficult ones.The next significant change came in the form of calls for nationalism, as a reaction to the wave of Westernization early in the Meiji period. Educationalcircles underwent a shift toward nationalist education, and the art worldexperienced a resurgence in traditional Japanese art led by the American Ernest Fenollosa and Tenshin Okakura, among others. Reflecting this trend, a large number of brush painting textbooks were written, and an authorization system similar to the one currently in effect was adopted. The ZugaTorishirabe Gakari [the Committee for the Study of Drawing] was launched in 1885, and then reorganized in 1887, at which time it was renamed the Tokyo Fine Arts School (currently the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music). The education offered at this new institution placed a strong emphasis on purely Japanese elements.In 1903, the Elementary School Order was revised and government-designated textbooks were issued. This system remained in force from 1904 until 1947. The debate surrounding pencil drawing and brush painting continued, and two types of texts were issued — a Enpitsuga Tehon [pencil drawing copybook] and a Mohitsuga Tehon [brush painting copybook] — either of which could be used by the instructor. Both copybooks had similar configurations, with copying as the basic theme, and using a progressive study method. Drawing was still an optional subject in ordinary elementary schoolsat the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Paul Oskar Kristeller 1905–1999Edward P. MahoneyPaul Oskar Kristeller was without doubt one of the most productive and accomplished scholars of this century. He received an excellent education in the classics at the Mommsen-Gymnasium in his native Berlin before going to the University of Heidelberg in 1923. There he pursued studies in a wide range of subjects, including medieval history, German literature, physics, and art history. The (...) philosophy professors who much influenced him both at Heidelberg and at Freiburg and Marburg were Ernst Hoffman, Karl Jaspers, Richard Kroner, and Martin Heidegger. In 1929 he received his doctorate from Heidelberg for his dissertation Der Begriff der Seele in der Ethik des Plotin, which was directed by Hoffman and published at Tübingen the same year. He then went to Berlin, where he engaged in formal studies in classical philology before going to Freiburg to do postgraduate work in philosophy with Heidegger during the years 1931 to 1933. Heidegger approved a study of Marsilio Ficino as Kristeller’s Habili-tationschrift and helped him to secure a fellowship enabling him to do research on Ficino and to begin writing. After visiting Italy during this period and taking into account the changed political scene in Germany, Kristeller decided in 1934 to move to Italy permanently. He taught in Florence in a high school for German Jewish students until he secured in 1935, with the help of Giovanni Gentile, a lectureship in German at the Scuola Superiore and the University of Pisa. He maintained throughout his academic career a personal and warm attachment to the Scuola Superiore. Moreover, he enjoyed throughout his subsequent career a warm and personal friendship with various Italian scholars that was first developed during his Italian stay in the thirties.While still in Italy, Kristeller completed his book on Ficino in 1937; he prepared an Italian version the next year. However, both the German and Italian versions would be published only years later. During this period he also engaged in manuscript studies in the major Italian cities, searching in particular for Ficino manuscripts. The result of these labors was his two-volume work, Supplementum Ficinianum: Marsilii Ficini Philosophi Platonici Opuscula Inedita et Dispersa, which was published by the Scuola Normale in 1937. He considered his “teachers” in manuscript studies to be Giovanni Cardinal Mercati, Monsignor Auguste Pelzer, and Ludwig Bertalot. Giovanni Gentile aided the publication of Kristeller’s Supplementum Ficinianum and subsequently helped him to emigrate to the United States. Kristeller always maintained a loyalty to Gentile and felt gratitude to him for extending him such help.In 1938 Kristeller lost his position at Pisa because of the Fascist anti-Semitic laws, but he was permitted to go to Rome where he assisted Bertalot in manuscript research at the Vatican library. Through the intervention of Roland H. Bainton, Dean P. Lockwood, Dom Anselm Strittmater, O.S.B., and other American [End Page 758] friends Kristeller was able to leave for the United States. He arrived at New York in February 1939 and spent the Spring term at Yale University. He was given an adjunct position at Columbia University for the fall term, holding the rank of Associate until 1948, when he was made an Associate Professor of Philosophy. By that time he had established himself as a major force in the development of Renaissance studies in the United States. His book on Ficino was translated into English as The Philosophy of Marsilio Ficino and published in 1943 by the Columbia University Press. The Italian version was published at Florence in 1953; a revised edition, containing a new bibliography that had been brought up to date, appeared in 1988.Kristeller published a large number of articles on a wide range of topics, establishing himself as a major interpreter of the significance of Renaissance humanism as well as a leading authority not only on Ficino and Renaissance Platonism but also on Pietro Pomponazzi and Renaissance Aristotelianism. He developed at Columbia bonds of friendship with Ernest A. Moody and John Herman Randall, Jr., both of whom had strong interests in late-medieval Aristotelianism. With Randall and Ernst Cassirer he prepared what would become a bestseller, the Renaissance Philosophy of Man: Selections... (shrink)

This volume complements the selections of Wilferd Madelung's articles previously published by Variorum (Religious Schools and Sects in Medieval Islam, Religious and Ethnic Movements in Medieval Islam and Studies in Medieval ShÄ«ism). The first sections contain articles examining intellectual and historical aspects of Mutazilism, the IbÄ á, iyya, á, ¤anafism and MÄ turidism, Sufism and Philosophy. The final group of articles focuses on aspects of early Muslim history. A detailed index completes the volume.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Eudora Welty House & GardenJessica RussellIf the past year had one theme, it would have been the gift of friendship. How heartening to reunite with fellow admirers of Eudora Welty on the grounds of her family home as our flagship events made their post-pandemic returns. Even so, among staff, 2022 brought challenges that, while unexpected, served to deepen our commitment to our mission and each other. Moreover, for every (...) achievement to follow in this report, there is a friendship to thank—whether with the Eudora Welty Foundation, our colleagues at the Mississippi Department of Archives & History (MDAH), individual volunteers, or community partners too numerous to list—each one a treasured marvel. For, in Eudora Welty's words, "as is true of all friendships, it might not have happened—and it did."Although we were saddened to say goodbye to our dear friend and former director Lauren Rhoades, to our delight she has returned time and again, as a volunteer, a guest, and even a guest speaker. Most impactful, Rhoades now supports sites like ours in an official capacity as the new director of grants at the Mississippi Arts Commission, where she connects arts-based organizations with potential funding opportunities. In this role, Rhoades informed the Eudora Welty Foundation about the Building Fund for the Arts Grant, to which they successfully applied. Because of this very grant, we can make perhaps our biggest announcement of 2022, which is that the Eudora Welty Foundation will break ground on the much-needed community arts building behind our Visitor Center. The report in this volume by the Foundation, which is supervising construction, contains more details on this exciting development.After Rhoades's departure, I had the great honor of transitioning to director. By December, we welcomed Lauren Claret to fill my former role as Garden Projects Specialist, ending a lengthy staff shortage. We even grew our team, adding Mary Atchley as a part-time Visitor Center Associate to handle our gift shop and ticket sales. All the while, my seasoned colleagues, Special Projects Coordinator Rachel Lott, and Education Specialist Jennifer [End Page 189] Rose, continued to shine in their respective roles: Lott coordinates volunteers and plans exhibits, events, and social media. Rose leads educational programs for students of all ages, in groups large and small, onsite and away.With such a small team, our museum depends heavily on volunteers to lead house tours and maintain the Welty garden, and recruiting new volunteers is our greatest need as we look ahead to 2023. We saw a precipitous drop in volunteers at the onset of the pandemic. Although visitation has started a noticeable rise, volunteer numbers have not yet picked up. (On that note, if you or someone you know is interested in becoming a Welty House volunteer, please email [email protected].) To each of our house docents and Cereus Weeders, we say a heartfelt "thank you."Fortunately, we had the support of two interns last fall. Victoria Richard (Millsaps College, via the Eudora Welty Foundation) led Welty House tours and updated our digital plant records database with an emphasis on the rose collection. Meanwhile, Nikki Maxwell (University of Southern Mississippi, via MDAH) worked primarily off-site with the MDAH Eudora Welty Collection, noting the numerous references to gardening in the recently unsealed Welty family papers.The annual teachers' CEU workshop took place virtually in February of 2022, comparing the works of Welty and Poe. Michael Pickard, Associate Professor of English and Creative Writing at Millsaps College, and Millsaps College Professor emerita Suzanne Marrs, led the course, and they will do so again on February 24, 2023—this time in person at the Eudora Welty House & Garden Visitor Center—comparing the work of Welty and Nathaniel Hawthorne. Thanks to support from MDAH and the Eudora Welty Foundation, teachers may attend the 2023 workshop at no charge.The in-person return of the Mississippi Book Festival in 2022 made for an exciting weekend in late August, when museum staff treated 110 festival panelists to private tours of the Welty House and Garden. We spent the next day seeing old friends, and making new ones, as 500 fellow book lovers visited our booth at the... (shrink)

*Winner of the American Society for Aesthetics 2019 Outstanding Monograph Prize* Until now, research on art schools has been largely occupied with the facts of particular schools and teachers. This book presents a philosophical account of the underlying practices and ideas that have come to shape contemporary art school teaching in the UK, US and Europe. It analyses two models that, hidden beneath the diversity of contemporary artist training, have come to dominate art schools. The first of (...) these is essentially an old approach: a training guided by the artistic values of a single artist-teacher. The second dates from the 1960s, and is based around the group crit, in which diverse voices contribute to an artist’s development. Understanding the underlying principles and possibilities of these two models, which sit together in an uneasy tension, gives new insights into the character of contemporary art school teaching, demonstrating how art schools shape art and artists, how they can be a potent engine of creativity in contemporary culture and how they contribute to artistic research. A Philosophy of the Art School draws on first-hand accounts of art school teaching, and is deeply informed by disciplines ranging from art history and art theory, to the philosophy of art, education and creativity. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:110 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY History of Aesthetics, Vol. I. Ancient Aesthetics. By Wladyslaw Tatarkiewicz. Ed. J. Harrell. Trans. Adam and Ann Czerniawski. (The Hague-Paris: Mouton and Warszawa: PWN-Polish Scientific Publishers, 1970. Pp. vii-352.) History of Aesthetics, Vol. II. Medieval Aesthetics. By WladySlaw Tatarkiewicz. Ed. C. Barrett. Trans. R. M. Montgomery. (The Hague-Paris: Mouton and Warszawa: PWN-Polish Scientific Publishers, 1970. Pp. vii-315.) These two volumes of (...) Tatarkiewicz' monumental history of aesthetics, the third volume (to 1700) of which is now being prepared for press, have been reviewed already in the major aesthetic journals in Europe and America following their publication in Polish. Since Polish is not one of my languages, I can say nothing about the adequacy of the (rather obscured) translators and their work. The editors of both volumes have done their difficult work thoroughly, though the usual inconsistencies of spelling and such creep in. British spellings of judgement, centre, and colour, for example, appear in one part of a volume, while center, color, and judgment appear in another part. These are rare and not at all irksome details. On p. 220 of volume I, Aristotle has become a Stagiryte (sic). If the editors and translators actually re-checked all of those Greek, Polish and English texts--to say nothing of the Latin--they have earned a very large debt indeed. Again, my selective ignorance eliminates me from assessment. Tatarkiewicz' historical writing is surgical and Lacon-like. His major achievement lies in refraining from philosophical animadversions and for sticking strictly to his topic, no matter how tempting the theoretic distractions. Actually one expects a history of aesthetics to find the locus of aesthetic theory in the usual systematic frameworks of outstanding philosophers, but again Tatarkiewicz knows better than to try to provide these settings. His device is to stay exactly with the texts of authors, and to provide as much evidence for his statements as a printed work will allow. His scholarship is truly prodigious, and the work will live as reference for a long time to come. But it is more than a reference. There are some remarkable novelties included that bear mention. First of all, Tatarkiewicz' opening analysis of what must be included in a history of aesthetics is penetrating and convincing. In addition to the major "dualities" of aesthetics (beauty-art, subjective-objective aesthetics, psychological-sociological aesthetics, descriptive-prescriptive aesthetics, etc.) he simply accepts the necessity to find evidence of aesthetic history among statements by artists, among the inexplicit and inarticulate art works, in the vox populi and cultural actions of people. Thus the "evidence" he adduces will often displease the theoretical purist. Next, one is impressed by the great antiquity of some key issues that are being avidly pursued today. What is impressive is not that they are being repeated now, but that modern writers so rarely recognize (or acknowledge) their historical sources---or seem to care to. A careful study of this history might do much to reduce the growing volume in aesthetics----or at least to change the direction of emphasis significantly. One is surprised to note which figures emerge as of first rate importance in the history of aesthetics, important for different reasons. These figures stand out: Democritus, Plotinus, Aristotle, Vitruvius, the Pseudo-Dionysius, Johannes Scotus Erigena, to select only a few. The first Polish philosopher, Vitelo, anticipates much modern psychologizing in advancing the work of Alhazen. Ockham, not so surprising, contributes major advances, as do Augustine and Aquinas. BOOK REVIEWS 111 One fascinating item is the author's extensive account of the most violent and extended controversy in the history of aesthetics---the veneration of images and the disputes between the Iconoclasts and the Iconophiles. This sometimes physical battle raged for over 100 years! The Byzantine society, obviously, took art seriously. Tatarkiewicz' great labor is an object lesson in historiography and bibliographic technique. At one and the same time it demonstrates how much of value remains to be discovered by careful adherence to the detail of scholarship, while it also displays how much fruitful scholarship depends upon a brilliant and profoundly informed mind. Such a work, in short, could only have descended from a fully mature... (shrink)

The Medieval period was one of the richest eras for the philosophical study of religion. Covering the period from the 6th to the 16th century, reaching into the Renaissance, "The History of Western Philosophy of Religion 2" shows how Christian, Islamic and Jewish thinkers explicated and defended their religious faith in light of the philosophical traditions they inherited from the ancient Greeks and Romans. The enterprise of 'faith seeking understanding', as it was dubbed by the medievals themselves, emerges (...) as a vibrant encounter between - and a complex synthesis of - the Platonic, Aristotelian and Hellenistic traditions of antiquity on the one hand, and the scholastic and monastic religious schools of the medieval West, on the other. "Medieval Philosophy of Religion" will be of interest to scholars and students of Philosophy, Medieval Studies, the History of Ideas, and Religion, while remaining accessible to any interested in the rich cultural heritage of medieval religious thought. (shrink)

The meaning of the noun 'creation', and the verb 'to create', range from the traditional theological idea of God creating ex nihilo to a more recent sense of the process of artistic conception. This collection of thirteen essays, written by scholars of music, literature, the visual arts, and theology, explores the complicated relationship between medieval rituals and theology, and the development of an idea of human artistic creation, which came to the fore in the sixteenth century. The volume concentrates (...) on the period from the Carolingians to the Counter-Reformation but also includes some twentieth-century musicians. Each essay is dedicated to a particular topic concerned with ritual or artistic beginnings, inventions, harmony and disharmony, as well as representations or celebrations of creation. Central themes include the interplay of the ideas of God as creator, of God acting and recreating in medieval liturgy, of God as artist - the deus artifex of the Pythagorean cosmology, which was occasionally referred to as recently as the early nineteenth century -and, finally, of the homo creator, a concept in which man reflected (and eventually replaced) God in his artistic creativity. This book therefore features new, significant, individual contributions from a range of scholarly disciplines, but, taken as a whole, it also constitutes a complex interdisciplinary study, with large-scale historical constructions. (shrink)

_From Knowledge to Beatitude _is a collection of original essays on the intersection between Christian theology and spiritual life primarily in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, especially in the Parisian School of St. Victor, which honors the influential work of Grover A. Zinn, Jr. Written by distinguished scholars from various fields of medieval studies, these essays range from the study of the exegetical school of twelfth-century St. Victor and medieval glossed Bibles to the medieval cultural reception of (...) women visionaries, preachers, and crusaders. Although focused on St. Victor, they provide analyses of Christian themes up to the modern period. A common thread is Zinn’s careful attention to the connections between medieval spirituality and biblical studies, the origin of these ideas, and their lasting influence in Christian culture. The essays take us from Hugh of St. Victor’s foundation—material culture—to the “beatitude” of a wider understanding of Victorine culture and its lasting legacy. This volume is a fitting tribute to a generous scholar, teacher, and mentor. It will appeal to historians, scholars of religion and theology, and art historians. "_From Knowledge to Beatitude_ serves a need and fills an important gap in the Victorine tradition, the history of medieval exegesis, and medieval studies. The volume also honors the contributions of Grover Zinn, an important medieval scholar and teacher. It serves as a model for doing research and generalizing in the field of medieval studies and demonstrates how the last generation and the current generation of medieval scholars have plowed through difficult primary and secondary sources to make the medieval traditions clear." —_Philip Krey, Lutheran Theological Seminary at Philadelphia_. (shrink)

The Performing Arts in Medieval Islam: Shadow Play and Popular Poetry in Ibn Dāniyāl’s Mamluk Cairo. By Li Guo. Islamic History and Civilization, vol. 93. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Pp. xiii + 240. $136.

7 lectures, Torquay, UK, August 12-20, 1924 (CW 311) These seven intimate, aphoristic talks were presented to a small group on Steiner's final visit to England. Because they were given to "pioneers" dedicated to opening a new Waldorf school, these talks are often considered one of the best introductions to Waldorf education. Steiner shows the necessity for teachers to work on themselves first, in order to transform their own inherent gifts. He explains the need to use humor to keep their (...) teaching lively and imaginative. Above all, he stresses the tremendous importance of doing everything in the knowledge that children are citizens of both the spiritual and the earthly worlds. And, throughout these lectures, he continually returns to the practical value of Waldorf education. These talks are filled with practical illustrations and revolve around certain themes--the need for observation in teachers; the dangers of stressing the intellect too early; children's need for teaching that is concrete and pictorial; the education of children's souls through wonder and reverence; the importance of first presenting the "whole," then the parts, to the children's imagination. Here is one of the best introductions to Waldorf education, straight from the man who started it all. German source: Die Kunst des Erziehens aus dem Erfassen der Menschenwesenhiet (GA 311). ∞ ∞ ∞ SYNOPSIS OF THE LECTURES LECTURE 1: The need for a new art of education. The whole of life must be considered. Process of incarnation as a stupendous task of the spirit. Fundamental changes at seven and fourteen. At seven, the forming of the "new body" out of the "model body" inherited at birth. After birth, the bodily milk as sole nourishment. The teacher's task to give "soul milk" at the change of teeth and "spiritual milk" at puberty. LECTURE 2: In first epoch of life child is wholly sense organ. Nature of child's environment and conduct of surrounding adults of paramount importance. Detailed observation of children and its significance. In second epoch, seven to fourteen, fantasy and imagination as life blood of all education, e.g., in teaching of writing and reading, based on free creative activity of each teacher. The child as integral part of the environment until nine. Teaching about nature must be based on this. The "higher truths" in fairy tales and myths. How the teacher can guide the child through the critical moment of the ninth year. LECTURE 3: How to teach about plants and animals (seven to fourteen). Plants must always be considered, not as specimens, but growing in the soil. The plant belongs to the earth. This is the true picture and gives the child an inward joy. Animals must be spoken of always in connection with humans. All animal qualities and physical characteristics are to be found, in some form, in the human being. Humans as synthesis of the whole animal kingdom. Minerals should not be introduced until twelfth year. History should first be presented in living, imaginative pictures, through legends, myths, and stories. Only at eleven or twelve should any teaching be based on cause and effect, which is foreign to the young child's nature. Some thoughts on punishment, with examples. LECTURE 4: Development of imaginative qualities in the teacher. The story of the violet and the blue sky. Children's questions. Discipline dependent on the right mood of soul. The teacher's own preparation for this. Seating of children according to temperament. Retelling of stories. Importance of imaginative stories that can be recalled in later school life. Drawing of diagrams, from ninth year. Completion and metamorphosis of simple figures, to give children feeling of form and symmetry. Concentration exercises to awaken an active thinking as basis of wisdom for later life. Simple color exercises. A Waldorf school timetable. The "main lesson." LECTURE 5: All teaching matter must be intimately connected with life. In counting, each different number should be connected with the child or what the child sees in the environment. Counting and stepping in rhythm. The body counts. The head looks on. Counting with fingers and toes is good (also writing with the feet). The ONE is the whole. Other numbers proceed from it. Building with bricks is against the child's nature, whose impulse is to proceed from whole to parts, as in medieval thinking. Contrast atomic theory. In real life we have first a basket of apples, a purse of coins. In teaching addition, proceed from the whole. In subtraction, start with minuend and remainder; in multiplication, with product and one factor. Theorem of Pythagoras (eleven-twelve years). Details given of a clear, visual proof, based on practical thinking. This will arouse fresh wonder every time. LECTURE 6: In first seven years etheric body is an inward sculptor. After seven, child has impulse to model and to paint. Teacher must learn anatomy by modeling the organs. Teaching of physiology (nine to twelve years) should be based on modeling. Between seven and fourteen astral body gradually draws into physical body, carrying the breathing by way of nerves, as playing on a lyre. Importance of singing. Child's experience of well being like that of cows chewing the cud. Instrumental music from beginning of school life, wind or strings. Teaching of languages; up to nine through imitation, then beginnings of grammar, as little translation as possible. Vowels are expression of feeling, consonants are imitation of external processes. Each language expresses a different conception. Compare head, Kopf, testa. The parts of speech in relation to the life after death. If language is rightly taught, out of feeling, eurythmy will develop naturally, expressing inner and outer experiences in ordered movements--"visible speech." Finding relationship to space in gymnastics. LECTURE 7: Between seven and fourteen soul qualities are paramount. Beginnings of science teaching from twelfth year only, and connected with real phenomena of life. The problem of fatigue. Wrong conceptions of psychologists. The rhythmic system, predominant in second period, never tires. Rhythm and fantasy. Composition. Sums from real life, not abstractions. Einstein's theory. The kindergarten--imitation of life. Teachers' meetings, the heart of the school. Every child to be in the right class for its age. Importance of some knowledge of trades, e.g., shoemaking, handwork, and embroidery. Children's reports-- characterization, but no grading. Contact with the parents. QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS: The close relationship of Multiplication and Division. How to deal with both together. Transition from the concrete to the abstract in Arithmetic. Not before the ninth year. Healthiness of English weights and measures as related to real life. Decimal system as an intellectual abstraction. Drawing. Lines have no reality in drawing and painting, only boundaries. How to teach children to draw a tree in shading, speaking only of light and color. (Illustration). Line drawing belongs only to geometry. Gymnastics and Sport. Sport is of no educational value, but necessary as belonging to English life. Gymnastics should be taught by demonstration. Religious Instruction. Religion lessons in the Waldorf school given by Catholic priest and Protestant pastor. "Free" religion lessons provided for the other children. Plan of such teaching described, of which the fundamental aim is an understanding of Christianity. The Sunday services. Modern Language Lessons. Choice of languages must be guided by the demands of English life. These can be introduced at an early age. Direct method in language teaching. Closing words by Dr. Steiner on the seriousness of this first attempt to found a school in England. (shrink)

In rich detail Jonathan Berkey interprets the social and cultural consequences of Islam's regard for knowledge, showing how education in the Middle Ages played a central part in the religious experience of nearly all Muslims. Focusing on Cairo, which under Mamluk rule was a vital intellectual center with a complex social system, the author describes the transmission of religious knowledge there as a highly personal process, one dependent on the relationships between individual scholars and students. The great variety of institutional (...) structures, he argues, supported educational efforts without ever becoming essential to them. By not being locked into formal channels, religious education was never exclusively for the elite but was open to all. Berkey explores the varying educational opportunities offered to the full run of the Muslim population--including Mamluks, women, and the "common people." Drawing on medieval chronicles, biographical dictionaries, and treatises on education, as well as the deeds of endowment that established many of Cairo's schools, he explains how education drew groups of outsiders into the cultural center and forged a common Muslim cultural identity. Originally published in 1992. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These paperback editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

aspirations, the rise of western monasticism was the most note worthy event of the early centuries. The importance of monasteries cannot be overstressed as sources of spirituality, learning and auto nomy in the intensely masculinized, militarized feudal period. Drawing their members from the highest levels of society, women's monasteries provided an outlet for the energy and ambition of strong-willed women, as well as positions of considerable authority. Even from periods relatively inhospitable to learning of all kinds, the memory has been (...) preserved of a good number of women of education. Their often considerable achievements and influence, however, generally lie outside even an expanded definition of philo sophy. Among the most notable foremothers of this early period were several whose efforts signal the possibility of later philosophical work. Radegund, in the sixth century, established one of the first Frankish convents, thereby laying the foundations for women's spiritual and intellectual development. From these beginnings, women's monasteries increased rapidly in both number and in fluence both on the continent and in Anglo-Saxon England. Hilda (d. 680) is well known as the powerful abbsess of the double monastery of Whitby. She was eager for knowledge, and five Eng lish bishops were educated under her tutelage. She is also accounted the patron of Caedmon, the first Anglo-Saxon poet of religious verse. The Anglo-Saxon nun Lioba was versed in the liberal arts as well as Scripture and canon law. (shrink)

The classical tradition of testimony in topics -- Three medieval traditions : Augustine, Boethius, and Cassiodoras -- Two renaissance traditions : Ciceronian and Augustinian -- The long influence of the port-royal logic -- Appreciating Aristotle : Thomists, Scots, and Oxford noetics -- Testimony becomes experience : the rise of critical thinking.

Karl Morrison discusses historical writing at a turning point in European culture: the so-called Renaissance of the twelfth century. Why do texts considered at that time to be masterpieces seem now to be fragmentary and full of contradictions? Morrison maintains that the answer comes from ideas about art. Viewing histories as artifacts made according to the same aesthetic principles as paintings and theater, he shows that twelfth-century authors and audiences found unity not in what the reason read in a text (...) but in what the imagination read into it: they prized visual over verbal imagination and employed a circular, or nuclear, spectator-centered perspective cast aside in the Renaissance of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Twelfth-century writers assimilated and transformed a tradition of the conceptual unity of all the arts and attributed that unity to the fact that art both conceals and discloses. Recovering that tradition, especially the methods and motives of concealment, provides extraordinary insights into twelfth-century ideas about the kingdom of God, the status of women, and the nature of time itself. It also identifies a strain in European thought that had striking affinities to methods of perception familiar in Oriental religions and that proved to be antithetic to later humanist traditions in the West. Originally published in 1990. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

The book reconstructs the history of Western ethics. The approach chosen focuses the endless dialectic of moral codes, or different kinds of ethos, moral doctrines that are preached in order to bring about a reform of existing ethos, and ethical theories that have taken shape in the context of controversies about the ethos and moral doctrines as means of justifying or reforming moral doctrines. Such dialectic is what is meant here by the phrase ‘moral traditions’, taken as a name (...) for threads of moral discourse, made in turn of other interwoven threads, including transmission of shared codes, appeals to reform of prevailing custom, rational argument about the justification of some precept on the basis of some shared general teaching or principle, and rational argument about the ultimate basis for principles and justification of authoritative teaching. That is, the approach adopted to the reading of ethical texts depends on a firm belief in the fact that philosophers hardly created any ethical doctrine out of nothing. The main point this book tries to highlight is how different philosophical theories emerged and followed each other as a result of attempts at accounting for what was going on in the world of moral traditions. Changes were propelled by controversies between different schools, and highly abstract arguments were the unintended effects of moves made by controversialists forced to transform (and occasionally to turn upside down) their own doctrines in order to face the challenge posed by other arguments. This is the reason why the book examines not only texts that already enjoy pride of place in the history of philosophy (Aristotle, Kant, Hegel), but also other texts usually treated in the histories of religions (the Bible, the Talmud, the Quran), and others considered to be much less philosophical (Plutarchus, Pufendorf). -/- 1. Plato and a response to ethical scepticism. Two different traditions of morality in VI-V century Greece are described. The birth of philosophical questioning of traditional morality and temporal and spatial variation of custom is described within the context of the v century crisis, the demise of traditional aristocratic and tyrannical rule and the birth of democracy. Two conflicting answers to the challenge are reconstructed, namely conventionalist or immoralist theories formulated by the Sophists and the eudemonist and intellectualist Socratic theory. Plato’s own reformulation of Socrates answer to the Sophists is reconstructed. His psychological views, his classification of the four cardinal virtues and his political theory are described as parts of a unitary system, culminating in an extremely realist moral ontology identifying the idea of the good with the essence of the (moral and extra-moral) world itself. -/- 2. Aristotle and the invention of practical philosophy. Aristotle’s invention of practical philosophy as a field separated from first philosophy is shown to be an implication of his break with Plato moral ultra-realism. Aristotle’s agenda in his moral works is arguably dependent on a polemical intention, namely dismantling Socratic intellectualism. The semi-inductive or virtuously circular method of practical philosophy is illustrated, starting with the received opinions of the better and wiser individuals and trying dialectically to sift what is left of mistake and inconsistence in such opinions, finally trying to correct mistakes and make the overall practical science more consistent. The chapter illustrates then the relationship of individual ethics, or ‘monastics’, with the art and the science of the pater familias, or ‘economics’, and the science of the ruler and citizen, or politics. The nature of virtues, or better, excellences of character, is discussed, highlighting the basic role of hexis, or ‘disposition’. Prudence, or better practical wisdom, is the focus of the chapter. Its relationship with bouleusis or deliberation is examined, and its autonomous status vis-à-vis theoretical knowledge is stressed. -/- 3. Diogenes and philosophy as a way of life. The chapter provides an overview of Hellenistic ethics, which almost amounts to Hellenistic schools of philosophy, in so far as ‘philosophy’ became in these centuries primarily the name for a way of life. The typical character of the Cynical movement is highlighted, that of a school of life, not a school aimed at providing any kind of intellectual training was to be provided. -/- 4. Epicurus and ethics as self-care. The peculiar character of the Epicurean school is described, a combination of a science of well-being aiming, more than at pleasure as in the popular view, at reduction of useless suffering, of unnecessary needs, and at a balanced selection of pleasures of the best and most durable kind. -/- 5. Epictetus and ethics as therapy of the passions. The various phases of Stoicism are described, and the shifting place given to ethics in the Stoic system of idea, culminating in the paradoxical view of ethics, its impossibility in principle notwithstanding, as the only truly significant and necessary part of philosophy. Cicero is treated, showing how his own synthesis of various Hellenistic trends is as a truly philosophical enterprise, deserving serious consideration after one or two centuries when he was confined to the role of literate. Epictetus is chosen as the best example of what the Stoic tradition could yield, an art of living based on sophisticated introspection, in turn aimed at making a kind of cognitive therapy possible, dismantling obnoxious passions at their root by systematically correcting false representations. -/- 6. Philo and the reconciliation of Torah and Platonism. A reconstruction of basic ideas from a few books of the Hebrew Bible is provided, starting with the Prophetic tradition and the focus on God’s mercy as the source of motivation and standard for human behaviour. Then a comparative analysis is undertaken of a parallel tradition, namely the three codifications of the Torā (Law or, better, Instruction), highlighting how a core of moral ideas may be recognized as a basis and preamble of codification of civil law, cultural practice, and regulation of ritual purity. The importance of Leviticus is stressed as the turning point when emphasis mercy, typical of the Prophetic tradition, is combined with the legal tradition, yielding the change in sensibility of the Second Temple time. Philo of Alexandria is described as one of the three leading figures – together with Rabbi Hillel and Rabbi Yeshua – at the apex the emergence of the mentioned new sensibility, gradually including mercy as an essential part of justice and establishing the starting point of both the Rabbinic and the Christian tradition. This consists precisely in the precept of one’s neighbour’s love or of the golden rule, two eventually identical precepts whose meaning is arguably more sober and sensible than the long-lasting Christian tradition deriving from John and Augustine has made us believe and no novelty vis-à-vis so-called Ancient-Testament teachings. -/- 7. Augustine and Christianity as Neo-Platonism. The first section examines the moral doctrines of so-called 'ethical Treaties' from the Talmud, a group of treaties, among which the best known is Pirqé Avot, that were left out of the six "orders" of the canon as they did not fit in any of the six groups of issues ritual or legal on which the division was based. According to Maimonides, their peculiar theme is provided by the Deòt, 'opinions', i.e., mental dispositions, that is, the translation of the Greek term hexeis and Arab akhlak (in turn providing in this language the name for ethics as such). The three topics I reconstruct are: i) the notion of Torah: The Torah is understood as the world order itself, or as the ‘Wisdom’ that existed even before creation and was ‘the tool by which the world was built’; however, the Torah is an earthly and human entity, as it was "received" by humans, and from that very moment belongs to them; ii) the relationship between love of God and love of neighbour; the treaties require us to study and practice the Torah ‘for its own sake’, that is, require us to act out of love, not out of fear or hope of reward; iii) the idea of sanctification of daily life: having disappeared with the destruction of the Temple the possibility of any conflict between liturgical service and everyday life, the latter is assumed to be in itself divine service: to give food to the poor has the same value as sacrifices in the Temple, and as an implication, the insistence become recurrent on the goodness of created things in themselves along with a polemic against ascetic currents. The conclusions drawn are: i) the moral teachings of the Talmud and those of Yeshua are, rather than similar, virtually identical; one may safely say that the precept of love and the golden rule are central ones for all Talmudic rabbis, that mercy plays an indispensable role alongside with justice, and the latter is not a different thing from one’s neighbour’s love; ii) a peculiarity of Talmud rabbis facing Yeshua is the idea of study as worship, and knowledge as a source of justice; but this is an idea of Judaism after the Temple's destruction that cannot be attributed to the Pharisees of Yeshua’s time; iii) the relation of study and practice in the Talmud parallels that between faith and deeds in Paul's epistles, that is, respectively faith or learning are a necessary and sufficient condition to be recognized as righteous , but deeds are the inevitable effect of either faith or learning. The sayings ascribed to Yeshua are examined first, yielding the conclusion that a close equivalent may be found for every saying in Talmudic literature and yet the whole is ascribed to one rabbi, with rather consistent stress on God’s mercy and unconditional forgiving as the mark of true imitation of God. Thus, Yeshua’s teaching is pure Judaism. The third section describes briefly the galaxy of Gnostic currents and Manichaeism, trying to sketch the profile of moral teachings resulting from an encounter of Asian spiritual traditions, Hellenistic lore and sparks of teachings from apocalyptic Jewish currents. The last section summarizes the turbulent history of several encounters between Christian currents and Hellenistic philosophical schools. The first one was with late Cynicism. Recent, rather controversial, literature discovered the jargon and a few topics from the Stoic-Cynical popular philosophy in a few books from the New Testament itself. This, far from proving that Rabbi Yeshua had been influenced by cynic preachers, is a proof of the necessity felt by Christian preachers to translate the original ‘Christian’ teaching into a Greek lexicon deeply impregnated with cynic terminology. The second was with Platonism, yielding the mild and temperate moral teaching of Clemens of Alexandria, teaching the sanctity of nature and the human body, the joy of moderate fruition of ‘natural’ kinds of pleasures, and the beauty of the marital life – in short, the opposite of the standard picture of Medieval Christianity. Ambrose of Milan brings about a different kind of synthesis, namely with Middle Platonism, where Stoic themes prevail. The most shocking case is Augustine, where an early Manichean education is overcome in a former phase by a synthesis of Plotinian Neo-Platonism and Christian preaching, yielding a sustained polemic with the Manicheans and rather optimistic views on life and Creation, the body and sexuality, and Hebrew-Judaic tradition not far from Clemens of Alexandria. In a later phase, occasioned by controversy on the opposite front, with such Christian currents as the Pelagians and Donatists, Augustine comes back to heavily anti-Judaic and world-denying ascetic attitudes where is earlier Manichean upbringing seems to emerge again. The tragedy of medieval Christianity will be the later Augustine’s overwhelming influence. A final section is dedicated to the monastic tradition where a curious mixture of world-denying asceticism with an astonishingly penetrating ‘science’ of introspection emerges. -/- 8. Al Farabi and the reconciliation of Islam and Platonism. The Qurān and the qadit, that is, collections of sayings ascribed to the prophet Muhammad contain a wealth of precepts and catalogues of virtues mirroring moral contents from the Jewish and the Christian traditions, among them the basic notion of imitation of the Deity, where mercy is assumed to be its basic trait. An important tradition within Islam, namely Sufism, stressed to the utmost degree the role of mercy, turning Islam into a mystic doctrine centred on retreat from the world, abandonment to God’s will, and a peaceful and fraternal attitude to our fellow-beings. A secular literary tradition originating in the Sassanid Empire, the literature of advice to the Prince had for a time a widespread influence in the newly constituted Arabic-Islamic commonwealth. In a later phase, the legacy of Hellenic philosophy made its way into the intellectual elite of the Islamic world. The first important legacy was Platonic, and the Republic became the main text for Islamic Platonism. Al-Farabi wrote an enjoyable remake of the Platonic Republic, arguing that the citizen’s virtues were the basis on which the political building needs to rest. The secular lawgiver is enlightened by the light of reason in his everyday practice of governance, but room is made for the Prophet as the voice of revealed truth that confirms and completes the rational truth that philosophy may afford. In a second phase also Aristotelian and Stoic influence were assimilated. Miskawayh’s treatise was the masterwork at the time Arabic philosophy reached its Zenith. It is a treatment of the soul’s diseases and their remedies, combining the Aristotelian doctrine of the golden mean with the Stoic doctrine of the passions and elements of Galenic medicine. Towards the eleventh-twelve centuries a war raged among theologians and philosophers, finally won by the former with disappearance of philosophy as such. The newly established mainstream, yet, was no kind of intolerant fanaticism. It drew from the work of mystic theologian Al-Ghazālī, the best heir of Sufism, teaching a tolerant and peaceful attitude to our fellow-beings and a passive attitude to destiny as an expression of the Divine will. -/- 9. Moshe ben Maimon and the reconciliation of Torah and Aristotelian ethics. The encounter between the Talmudic tradition and Hellenic philosophy had taken place a first time in Alexandria at the time of Philo but the two traditions had parted way again. In fact, the kind of Platonic Judaism founded by Philo survived only within Christianity, in the fourth Gospel and then in writings by Clemens of Alexandria. The Talmudic literature had absorbed just less striking traits from the Hellenic Philosophy, namely an idea of ethics as care of the self and a role for the education of character as propaedeutic to theoretical knowledge. In the Arabic-Islamic world, a second round started when Jewish authors writing in Arabic undertook the task to prove the full compatibility of the tradition deriving from Torah and Platonic philosophy. The culmination of this attempt is provided by Moshe ben Maimon who tried to use Aristotelian ethics as a language into which the teaching from the Pirké Avot could be translated. -/- 10. Thomas Aquinas and the reconciliation of Christian morality and Aristotelian ethics. In the first section the fresh start is described of philosophical ethics in Latin Europe at the turn of the Millennium. In a first phase, Anselm and Peter Abelard built on a Platonic and Augustinian legacy. In this phase. remarkable innovations are introduced, including Abelard’s claim of the obliging character of erring consciousness. In a second phase, the rediscovery of Nicomachean Ethics thanks to Latin translation of Arabic versions gives birth to a new wave of ethical studies, recovering the very idea of Aristotelian practical philosophy, with the potential implication of full legitimization of natural morality, i.e. ethics without Revelation. Aquinas’s ethics is a theological ethics out of which it would be vain to try to extract a self-contained philosophical ethics. His treatment of topics in philosophical ethics, yet, does not boil down to repetition of Aristotelian arguments but is rather a creative reshaping of such arguments. For example, he introduces also in the practical philosophy a first principle parallel to the principle of non-contradiction; and he also carries out a synthesis of Aristotelianism, Stoicism, and neo-Platonism. Even though it is essentially moral theology, Aquinas’s doctrine - unlike Augustine – grants full citizenship to "natural" morality, firstly by rejecting the claim that the corruption of human nature due to the original sin is so radical as to leave "pure nature" incapable of moral goodness. The doctrine is presented in a more sophisticated formulation in a few of the Quaestiones, such as De Malo and De Veritate, in the Summa contra Gentes and in the commentaries to Aristotle than in the famous Summa Theologica, but the latter work includes the only or the largest exposition of some decisive part of the theory. Thus, the Summa Theologica should be read for what it is more than criticized for not being what it was not meant to be. It was not meant to be the brilliant synthesis of all that Reason he had been able to produce with what Revelation had added about which the Neo-Thomists used to dream, but rather a manual for the training of preachers and confessors, where theoretical claims are not too demanding and a few serious tensions are left. Besides a jump between the Prima Secundae and the Secunda Secundae, being the former an essay in virtue theory and the latter a handbook for confessors, the most serious tension is perhaps the one between the ethics of right reason presented in most of Ia-IIae and the eudemonistic ethics developed in quaestiones 1-5 of the same part; the alternative ethical theory which also may be found in Augustine, the Stoic view of a cosmic reason eventually coincident with the moral law, was believed by Anselm (followed by John Duns Scotus and William of Ockham) to be incompatible with eudemonism. It is questionable whether Thomas could reduce the tension proving that it is just an apparent tension, in so far as the right reason and bliss derived from knowledge of God tend to coincide, but this is just a conjecture. Thomas’s ethics is a virtue ethic, not a law-based one, and moral judgment focuses on the virtues, particularly charity, not on the commandments and even less on absolute prohibitions; Thomas, however, would not have considered a drastic alternative between law and the virtues such as the one which has been advanced in late twentieth-century philosophy to be justified. Nonetheless, when it discusses ‘special’ virtues, it ceases to be an ethics of virtue and becomes a disappointing and often contradictory discussion of legal and illegal acts. Such a discussion takes most of the time ‘reasonable’ middle positions on controversial issues but not the alternative approach that Aristotelianism would have made possible; even when some occasional Aristotelian claim shows up, such as money’s barrenness as a reason against usury, this seems to be made by an author who apparently ignores the Aristotelian Thomas of the Prima Secundae. It is an ethic of human autonomy which recognizes the binding character of the individual conscience and, potentially, even a duty to disobey unjust laws. It is true that what Thomas writes in his discussion of death penalty and persecution of heretics is simply disgusting, and yet we should blame Thomas the man, not Thomist ethical theory. Finally, Thomas’s ethics is not ethical ‘absolutism’, as both traditionalist Catholic theologians and secularist enemies of dogmatic morality tend to believe. It is instead an ethic of prudential judgment. Exceptions to this approach – or better results of logical fallacies – are such claims as the absolute character of negative precepts and of the existence of "intrinsically evil acts", claims that simply cease to make sense in the light of Thomas’s own distinction between human act and natural act, carrying consequences Thomas did not live long enough to draw or was not consistent enough to dare to draw. -/- 11. Francisco de Vitoria and casuistry. The first topic illustrated is the discussion about the notion of pura natura, namely the human condition after the original sin and before divine revelation. The core notion was already there in Aquinas but was later developed by Caietanus (Thomas de Vio) with a number of interesting implications: firstly a view of human nature as such much more positive than Augustine’s and his followers’ view, including both Calvinists and Jansenists; secondly, the implication that the philosopher’s morality, as opposed to the Christian’s morality, is a quite respectable kind of morality; thirdly, that theocracy and prosecution of the unfaithful lacked justification, with more far-fetching consequences than Aquinas himself had dared to draw. The second topic is casuistry, a new name for a comparatively older way of thinking, which was already there in late Stoicism and Cicero as well as in the Talmudic literature. This is an approach aimed at yielding probable enough solutions for doubtful cases even in absence of completely safe staring points. The genre developed from medieval reference books for confessors and became by the sixteenth-century a sophisticated tool-box for dealing with various fields of applied ethics. Francisco Vitoria, the main authority of Baroque Scholasticism, was a controversial figure, among the proponents of the new discipline of casuistry and a consistent proponent of more separation between the religious and the civil authority, stricter limits to the legitimacy of war, innate rights of non-Christian nations in the New World based on the notion of pura natura, providing a standard of ‘natural’ goodness, previous to revelation, on which the Indian nations were judged to live in a naturally good condition, provided with the institutions of family, justice, and religion had accordingly a right to full respect by Christian sovereigns. Bartolomé de Las Casas, arguing along similar lines, was the leader of a historical battle in defence of the rights of the Indios. -/- 12. Michel de Montaigne and the art of living. A short description of one of the Renaissance Phyrronism, one of the classical philosophies revived in the fifteenth and sixteenth century. Montaigne combines the sceptical epistemology with an understanding of ethics – indeed of philosophy as a whole – in terms of an art of living inspired by two basic ideas, sagesse, that is, practical wisdom as the only kind of rationality available after theology, science, and tradition have declared bankrupt, and an aesthetic ideal of self-transformation through the art of writing and introspection. -/- 13. Pierre Nicole and neo-Augustinianism. The chapter illustrates first the vicissitudes of Augustinianism newly born after the late medieval triumph of Thomist Aristotelianism in the alternative Protestant and Catholic versions processed by the Calvinists and the Jansenists. Then it illustrates the doctrines of Pierre Nicole, Blaise Pascal’s best disciple, on the impossibility of introspection, on the ubiquity of self-deception, on the incurably evil character of the passion of love, and on the two moralities, the one of the man of the world, the morality of honesty which is indispensable for granting peace and order but devoid of any true value for eternal salvation, since the same external behaviour may be prompted by opposite motivations, and the morality of charity, the only true one but also useless to society. The third topic is Pierre Malebranche’s view of self-deception as a ubiquitous phenomenon accounting for human action and responsibility and his reformulated theory of self-love, no less ubiquitous than for Nicole and yet not as incurably evil, given the distinction between morally indifferent and even necessary amour de soi and vicious amour proper, a distinction on which the whole of Rousseau’s moral and political theory rests. -/- 14. Samuel von Pufendorf and the new science of morality. The chapter is dedicated to the discovery of the idea of a ‘new moral science’. Hugo Grotius is discussed first highlighting the real character of his project, much closer to the Thomist idea of a natural law accessible to non-corrupted human reason when human beings are living in a state of pura natura. Then Hobbes’s combination of scepticism, voluntarism, and conventionalism is described and both the continuity with Grotius’s new science, in the search for non-revealed rational morality, and the break with him, in the adoption of voluntarism and refusal of an intellectualist view of natural law, are illustrated. Pufendorf’s work is illustrated as a synthesis of the two previous attempts and the – up to Schneewind underestimated – paradigmatic example of the new science of morality. -/- 15. Richard Cumberland and consequentialist voluntarism. The chapter gives an overview of eighteenth-century Anglican ethics, noticing how the Cambridge tradition gave special weight to natural theology as opposed to positive or revealed theology – and how two Cambridge fellows, John Gay and Thomas Brown, elaborated on Cumberland’s (and Malebranche’s, as well as Leibniz’s) strategy for finding a third way between intellectualist view and voluntarist view of the laws of nature. The result of their elaboration was a kind of a rational-choice account of the origins of natural laws, where a law-giver God chooses among a number possible sets of laws on a maximizing criterion, and God’s maximandum is happiness for his creatures. The chapter notices also how such a solution aimed at solving at once the problem of evil and that of the foundation of moral obligation by proving how God’s choice was justified as far as it was the one minimising the amount of suffering in the world. 16. Richard Price and intuitionism. The chapter describes first the doctrines of the Cambridge Platonists, an example of hyper-rationalist reaction to Calvinism. Secondly it describes the sophisticated and universally ignored – from Sidgwick to Anscombe –version of what was later labelled ‘ethical intuitionism’ – showing how it escapes familiar objections and misrepresentations of intuitionism – from Mill to Rawls – in grounding its argument on transcendental arguments while carefully avoiding recourse to introspection and psychological evidence, which has been taken as a too easy target by critics of intuitionism. Thirdly, the chapter discusses Whewell’s ‘philosophy of morality’, as opposed to ‘systematic morality’, not unlike Kant’s distinction between a pure and an empirical moral philosophy. Whewell worked out a systematization of traditional normative ethics as a first step before its rational justification; he believed that the point in the philosophy of morality is justifying a few rational truths about the structure of morality such as to rule hedonism, eudemonism, and consequentialism; yet a system of positive morality cannot be derived solely from such rational truths but requires consideration of the ongoing dialectics between idea and fact in historically given moralities. Whewell’s intuitionism turns out closer to Kantian ethics than commentators have made us believe until now, and quite different from what Sidgwick meant by intuitionism. -/- 17. Adam Smith and the morality of role-switch. The chapter describes first, Hutcheson’s attempt at basing the ‘new science’ of natural law on different bedrock than Pufendorf and the English Platonists, namely a moral sense, a faculty whose existence is assumed to be proved on an empirical basis. The second step is a reconstruction of Hume’s rejoinder in terms of a new science of man including morality on an ‘experimental’ basis, that is, a ‘Newtonian’ hypothetical-deductive approach, distinguished from Hutcheson’s allegedly uncritical descriptive approach to human nature. The third step is a reconstruction of Adam Smith theory of morality understood as emerging from a spontaneous interplay of exchanges of situations (the most basic meaning of the word ‘sympathy’ as construed by this author). -/- 18. Jeremy Bentham and utilitarianism. The bulk of the chapter is dedicated to the doctrines of Jeremy Bentham. The Enlightenment spirit that suggested the idea of a new morality, free from religion, is illustrated. The notion of utility is illustrated as well as the subsequent formulations of the principle of utility. The idea of felicific calculus is discussed, showing how its inner difficulties prompted several reformulations of the principle of utility in order to avoid undesirable implications of proposed formulations. The role of the thesis of spontaneous convergence between interest and duty is discussed, showing how it left numberless questions open, and the distinction between the virtues of prudence, justice and beneficence is described as a way out of the deadlocks of classical utilitarianism. After Bentham, Mill’s reformed utilitarianism is reconstructed, showing how it is a kind of mixed system – as closer to common sense as it gives up Bentham’s claims to consistency and simplicity – resulting as unintended consequences from the controversies in which Mill was too keen to engage. The hidden agenda of the controversy between Utilitarianism and Intuitionism, going beyond the image of the battle between Prejudice and Reason, is described, showing how both competing philosophical outlooks turn out to be more research programs than self-contained doctrinal bodies, and such programs appear to be implemented, and indeed radically transformed while in progress thanks to their enemies no less than to their supporters. -/- 19. Immanuel Kant, practical reason and judgment. The chapter argues that Kant took from Moses Mendelssohn the idea of a distinction between geometry of morals and a practical ethic. He was drastically misunderstood by his followers precisely on this point. He had learned from the sceptics and the Jansenists the lesson that men are prompted to act by deceptive ends, and he was aware that human actions are also empirical phenomena, where laws like the laws of Nature may be detected. His practical ethics made room for judgment as a holistic procedure for assessing the saliency of relevant moral qualities in one given situation; this procedure yields the same results as the geometry of morals does for abstract cases but does so immediately and without balancing conflicting duties with each other, since what makes for the salient quality of a situation is perceived from the very beginning. Kant's practical philosophy is richer than the received image, making room for an ‘empirical moral philosophy’ or moral anthropology including treatment of commerce, needs, value and price, happiness and well-being; the overall social theory and philosophy of history is less different from Adam Smith's than the received image makes believe; the paradox of happiness is central to Kant's philosophy; a distinction between happiness and well-being is clearly drawn; the distinction plays a basic role in establishing a link between the economic and the moral life. -/- 20. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and the critique of abstract universalism. The chapter describes first the Romantic movement and the implications some of its concerns, rescuing passions, community, tradition, the individual as the bearer of a unique destiny, and the longing for organic unity between the individual, mankind and nature. Hegel’s contribution is discussed then, highlighting how, on the one hand, he shared a number of these concerns and on the other he had more rationalist leanings. The notion of morality is the pivotal point of the reconstruction, highlighting how Hegel construes this notion as a key to his own diagnosis of the malaise of modernity – the separation of individual and Gemeinschaft – and how his attack on Kant turns around this very idea. -/- 21. Friedrich Nietzsche against Christianity and the Enlightenment. The chapter illustrates first the idea of deconstruction of the back-world of values. Nietzsche claims to be legitimate heir of the French moralists, Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, in so far as he allegedly carries out to its deepest implications their discovery of what lies behind traditional naïve belief in the existence of an objective realm of values just waiting for description by the philosopher. The two exemplars form which genealogy draws inspiration are the classical philologist’s historical reconstructions of lost meanings and the chemist’s decomposition of elements. Then the genealogy of the notions of good and evil carried out in the first dissertation of Genealogy of morals is illustrated with its paradoxical conclusion that will to power is in fact the only ‘genuine’ kind of goodness. The third point illustrated is the dialectic of ascetism and self-realization with its ambiguous outcome. The suggested interpretation of such outcome is that Nietzsche’s normative ethics is a kind of virtue ethics taking an aesthetic ideal as a normative standard -/- 22. George Edward Moore and ideal utilitarianism. The chapter discusses the ideas of common sense and common-sense morality in Sidgwick. I argue that, far from aiming at overcoming common-sense morality, Sidgwick aimed purposely at grounding a consist code of morality by methods allegedly taken from the natural sciences to reach, also in ethics, the same kind of “mature” knowledge as in the natural sciences. His whole polemics with intuitionism was vitiated by the a priori assumption that the widespread ethos of the educated part of humankind, not the theories of the intuitionist philosophers, was what was worth considering as the expression of intuitionist ethics. In spite of a naïve positivist starting-point, Sidgwick was encouraged by his own approach in exploring the fruitfulness of coherentist methods for normative ethics. Thus, Sidgwick left an ambivalent legacy to twentieth-century ethics: the dogmatic idea of a “new” morality of a consequentialist kind, and the fruitful idea that we can argue rationally in normative ethics albeit without shared foundations. Then it reconstructs the background of ideas, concerns and intentions out of which Moore’s early essays, the preliminary version, and then the final version of Principia Ethica originated. I stress the role of religious concerns, as well as that of the Idealist legacy. I argue that PE is more a patchwork of rather diverging contributions than a unitary work, not to say the paradigm of a new school in Ethics. I add a comparison with Rashdall’s almost contemporary ethical work, suggesting that the latter defends the same general claims in a different way, one that manages to pave decisive objections in a more plausible way. I end by suggesting that the emergence of Analytic Ethics was a more ambiguous phenomenon than the received view would make us believe, and that the wheat (or some other gluten-free grain) of this tradition, that is, what logic can do for philosophy, should be separated from the chaff, that is, the confused and mutually incompatible legacies of Utilitarianism and Idealism. -/- 23. Edmund Husserl and the a-priori of action. The chapter illustrates first the idea of phenomenology and the Husserl’s project of a phenomenological ethic as illustrated in his 1908-1914 lectures. The key idea is dismissing psychology and trying to ground a new science of the a priori of action, within which a more restricted field of inquiry will be the science of right actions. Then the chapter illustrates the criticism of modern moral philosophy carried out in the 1920 lectures, where the main target is naturalism, understood in the Kantian meaning of primacy of common sense. The third point illustrate is Adolph Reinach’s theory of social acts as a key the grounding of norms, a view that basically sketches the very ideas ‘discovered’ later by Clarence I. Lewis, John Searle, Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas. A final section is dedicated to Nicolai Hartman, who always refused to define himself a phenomenologist and yet developed a more articulated and detailed theory of ‘values’ – with surprising affinities with George E. Moore - than philosophers such as Max Scheler who claimed to Husserl’s legitimate heirs. -/- 24. Bertrand Russell and non-cognitivism. The chapter reconstructs first the discussion after Moore. The naturalistic-fallacy argument was widely accepted but twisted to prove instead that the intuitive character of the definition of ‘good’, its non-cognitive meaning, in a first phase identified with ‘emotive’ meaning. Alfred Julius Ayer is indicated as a typical proponent of such non-cognitivist meta-ethics. More detailed discussion is dedicated to Bertrand Russell’s ethics, a more nuanced and sophisticated doctrine, arguing that non-cognitivism does not condemn morality to arbitrariness and that the project of a rational normative ethics is still possible, heading finally to the justification of a kind of non-hedonist utilitarianism. Stevenson’s theory, another moderate version of emotivism is discussed at some length, showing how the author comes close to the discovery of the role of a pragmatic dimension of language as a basis for ethical argument. Last of all, the discussion from the Forties about Hume’s law is described, mentioning Karl Popper’s argument and Richard Hare’s early non-cognitivist but non-emotivist doctrine named prescriptivism. -/- 25. Elizabeth Anscombe and the revival of virtue ethics. The chapter discusses the three theses defended by Anscombe in 'Modern Moral Philosophy'. I argue that: a) her answer to the question "why should I be moral?" requires a solution of the problem of theodicy, and ignores any attempts to save the moral point of view without recourse to divine retribution; b) her notion of divine law is an odd one more neo-Augustinian than Biblical or Scholastic; c) her image of Kantian ethics and intuitionism is the impoverished image manufactured by consequentialist opponents for polemical purposes and that she seems strangely accept it; d) the difficulty of identifying the "relevant descriptions" of acts is not an argument in favour of an ethics of virtue and against consequentialism or Kantian ethics, and indeed the role of judgment in the latter is a response to the difficulties raised by the case of judgment concerning future action. A short look at further developments in the neo-naturalist current is given trough a reconstruction of Philippa Foot’s and Peter Geach’s critiques to the naturalist-fallacy argument and Alasdair MacIntyre’s grand reconstruction of the origins and allegedly unavoidable failure of the Enlightenment project of an autonomous ethic. -/- 26. Richard Hare and neo-Utilitarianism. The chapter addresses the issue of the complex process of self-transformation Utilitarianism underwent after Sidgwick’s and Moore’s fatal criticism and the unexpected Phoenix-like process of rebirth of a doctrine definitely refuted. A glimpse at this uproarious process is given through two examples. The first is Roy Harrod Wittgensteinian transformation of Utilitarianism in pure normative ethics depurated from hedonism as well as from whatsoever theory of the good. This results in preference utilitarianism combined with a ‘Kantian’ version of rule utilitarianism. The second is Richard Hare’s two-level preference utilitarianism where act utilitarianism plays the function of eventual rational justification of moral judgments and rule-utilitarianism that of action-guiding practical device. -/- 27. Hans-Georg Gadamer and rehabilitation of practical philosophy. The post-war rediscovery of ethics by many German thinkers and its culmination in the Sixties in the movement named ‘Rehabilitation of practical philosophy’ is described. Among the actors of such rehabilitation there were a few of Heidegger’s most brilliant disciples, and Hans-Georg Gadamer is chosen as a paradigmatic example. His reading of Aristotle’s lesson I reconstructed, starting with Heidegger’s lesson but then subtly subverting its outcome thanks to the recovery of the central role of the notion of phronesis. -/- 28. Karl-Otto Apel and the revival of Kantian ethics. Parallel to the neo-Aristotelian trend, there was in the Rehabilitation of practical philosophy a Kantian current. This started, instead than the rehabilitation of prudence, with the discovery of the pragmatic dimension of language carried out by Charles Peirce and the Oxford linguistic philosophy. On this basis, Karl-Otto Apel singled out as the decisive proponent of the linguistic and Kantian turn in German-speaking ethics, worked out the performative-contradiction argument while claiming that this was able to provide a new rational and universal basis for normative ethics. An examination of his argument is some detail is offered, followed by a more cursory reconstruction of Jürgen Habermas’s elaboration on Apel’s theory. -/- 29. John Rawls and public ethics as applied ethics. Rawls’s distinction between a “political” and a “metaphysical” approach to one central part of ethical theory, namely the theory of justice, is interpreted as a formulation of the same basic idea at the root of both the principles approach and neo-casuistry, both discussed in the following chapter, namely that it is possible to reach an agreement concerning positive moral judgments even though the discussion is still open – and in Rawls’ view never will be close – on the basic criteria for judgment. -/- 30. Beauchamp and Childress and bioethics as applied ethics. The chapter presents the revolution of applied ethics while stressing its methodological novelty, exemplified primarily by Beauchamp and Childress principles approach and then by Jonsen and Toulmin’s new casuistry. -/- . (shrink)

The name "School of Salamanca" refers to a group of theologians and natural law philosophers who taught in the University of Salamanca, following the inspiration of the great Thomist Francisco de Vitoria. It turns out that the Scholastics were not simply medieval, but began in the 13th century and expanded through the 16th and 17th centuries; and they developed some original theories about economics and international law.Why should a few men mainly interested in theology and ethics apply themselves in (...) analyzing issues so far from their worries? The answer leads us to a revision of the morality rules, due to the new problems in business ethics. Thus, for example, the appearance of inflation made them have doubts about the merchant's morality. In order to solve this and other problems, they began to analyze the new and suspicious economic activity. As a result of their observations about ethical issues they discovered some advanced theories for the history of economic thought, such as the early formulation of the quantity theory of money. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:470 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY of fundamental notions (e.g.,"creator" and "demiurge") are omnipresent. Sometimes even a confusion happens of Anaxagoras with Democritus when the "atom" is ascribed to Anaxagoras (p. 48). And the author does not seem to feel the fatal inadequacy of merely second-hand knowledge. While he in longura et latum argues with Aristotelian presentations and misrepresentations of Anaxagorean tenets, there is good reason for the suspicion that (...) he might never have read even one authentic sentence written by Anaxagoras himself. For those interested in general cultural history, this book, the religious diatribe of a modem Zoroastrian believer, is very worthwhile reading. For the historian of philosophy, itis of rather modest value. P-~LIX M. CLEVE New School for Social Research New York City The Esthetics of the Middle Ages. By Edgar De Bruyne. Trans. Eileen B. Hennessy. (New York: Frederick Uugar, 1969. Pp. viii+232. $6.50) This book has a very complex character. It is the English translation of a French work, L'Esth~tique du moyen dge,I which, in turn, is a one-volume abridged version by Edgar De Bruyne of his own original three-volume work, I~tudes d'Esth~tique M~di~vale.2 Thus, one may evaluate this book either as a translation or, presupposing the faithfulness and correctness of the translation itself,as a relatively short work by E. De Bruyne, or else in its relation to or as compared with the original three-volume work. I will confine myself here to the lattertwo considerations.3 First, considering this book in comparison with the three-volume original work, one of the principal writings of De Bruyne and one of the most significant contemporary contributions to the history of medieval aesthetics, we can find both quantitative and qualitative differences between the original work and its abridged version. The quantitative difference is considerable. While the abridged work, at least in its English translation, is less than a quarter of a thousand pages in length, the original work includes altogether 1,224 pages 4 and is thus more than five times longer than thc translated abridged version of it. The qualitative or methodological difference is at least equally great. In the original work, each of the three volumes deals primarily with the various medieval authors of aesthetic works and doctrines in a chronological order.5 In contrast, the contents of the translated abridged version follow a topical arrangement with chronology playing only a subordinate role, if any at all, within Louvain. L'InstitutSupdrieur de Philosophic, 1947. Brugge: De Tempel, 1946. s I have had no access to the abridged French original. 9 Vol. I, xiv+370; II, x-{-420; III,x-F400. 9 VoL I: Boethius to Erigena; II. "L'l~poque Romane," from the Carolingian period to the schools of Chartres and St. Victor; and Ill:the thirteenthcentury, from St. Bernard to Duns Scotus. BOOK REVIEWS 471 each topic. The six chapters are entitled, "'The Sources," "The Fundamental Principles," "Various Esthetic Systems," "The Esthetic Experience," "Art," and "The Fine Arts." To this may be added a third difference that is the result of the first two differences. There is virtually neither any direct quotation from any author on any topic, nor a~y direct reference to texts in the works of medieval authors mentioned or discussed. While the quantitative difference in itself is understandable, since only a scholar specializing in this field would read over 1,200 pages on medieval aesthetics, and while the qualitative difference is perfectly justified in terms of an intelligent summary, the absence especially of direct references to discussed texts is, as will be shown below, deeply regxettable. So much for the relative consideration of this translated abridged work. Let us next consider the abridged work in itself in the form of a positive and a negative evaluation. Second, despite the relative brevity of the work, one finds this book extremely valuable both in terms of the quantity and the quality of the data it contains. As to quantity, De Bruyne manages to compress an enormous amount of information about medieval aesthetic thought into this book. The significance of this, to confine ourselves at this point only... (shrink)

Based on narrative, iconographical, and liturgical sources, this is the first systematic study to trace the story of the ritual of royal self-coronations from Ancient Persia to the present. Exposing as myth the idea that Napoleon's act of self-coronation in 1804 was the first extraordinary event to break the secular tradition of kings being crowned by bishops, Jaume Aurell vividly demonstrates that self-coronations were not as transgressive or unconventional as has been imagined. Drawing on numerous examples of royal self-coronations, with (...) a particular focus on European Kings of the Middle Ages, including Frederic II of Germany, Alphonse XI of Castile, Peter IV of Aragon and Charles III of Navarra, Aurell draws on history, anthropology, ritual studies, liturgy and art history to explore royal self-coronations as privileged sites at which the frontiers and limits between the temporal and spiritual, politics and religion, tradition and innovation are encountered. (shrink)

The main object of this study is to find out whether the differences between classical and medieval thinking about work, occupations and technology are so significant that we are justified in speaking of a real break between Antiquity and the Middle Ages in this connection; or whether there is a possible continuity of ideas. From a comparative perspective five themes are being researched to shed light on this ques-tion. In the first two chapters the author looks into the traditional (...) view of negative ideas about work in Antiquity. Chapter three subsequently deals with monks and their attitude towards labour. In chapter four the place of the so-called artes mechanicae in medieval classifications of knowledge is being studied. In chapter five we find an analysis of twelfth-century sermons ad status. These three chapters principally deal with the question whether Christianity brought about a change in attitude towards work. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:7 Franciscan Studies 62 (2004) THE FRANCISCAN INSTITUTE HONORS GIOVANNI MICCOLI On July 16, 2004 Professor Giovanni Miccoli, a respected scholar of medieval, Church and Franciscan history, received the Franciscan Institute Medal from St. Bonaventure University during its celebration of the Feast of St. Bonaventure. University president Sr. Margaret Carney, O.S.F., and Fr. Michael Cusato, O.F.M., director of The Franciscan Institute and dean of the School of (...) Franciscan Studies, presented the medal during an Academic Convocation at 7 p.m. in The Regina A. Quick Center for the Arts. A reception followed in the Dresser-Rand Atrium. During the Convocation, Giovanni Miccoli gave a presentation, “A Reading of the Christian Proposal of Francis According to His First Biographers,” continuing a longtime focus on the study of Francis of Assisi and his contributions to the Church. Professor Miccoli, who was born in Trieste, Italy, in 1933, studied in Pisa at the Scuola Normale Superiore and the Università, in Munich at the Monumenta Germaniae Historica, and London at the Warburg Institute. He has taught in Pisa, Venice and his native Trieste, where he is now a professor emeritus at the Università di Trieste. A historian of the Middle Ages and of the Roman Catholic Church, he has combined those loves to specialize first in the Gregorian Reformation, reforms undertaken within the Church under Pope Gregory VII at the end of the 11th century. Turning his eyes to more modern times, he is also an expert on the relationship between the Catholic Church and Fascism in Italy, including the questions related to Pius XII’s pontificate during World War II. His study of the Church in Italy during the Middle Ages led to a focus on Francis of Assisi and his impact on the Church, which led to his becoming one of foremost Franciscan scholars of modern times. Miccoli is particularly known for his contribution to 1974’s “La Storia Religiosa” (Religious History of Italy), which is the second volume of “Storia d’Italia” (History of Italy). In “La Storia Religiosa” he examined how Francis and his movement influenced the history and development of the Church in Italy. 8 GIOVANNI MICCOLI Since that time, he has published several major articles on Franciscan issues, largely drawing from early Franciscan documents and sources, which have been translated from Italian to English and published in Greyfriars Review, a publication of the Franciscan Institute. One essay, “Francis of Assisi’s Christian Proposal,” was published in Italian in 1983 and in Greyfriars Review in 1989; another, “A Christian Experience Between Gospel and Institution,” appeared in Italian in 1992 and in Greyfriars Review in 1997; while a third, “The Writings of Francis,” was published in Italian in 1997 and in Greyfriars Review in 2001. The Franciscan Institute established the medal in 1987 to honor scholars who have made outstanding contributions to Franciscan studies in the areas of philosophy, theology, history and spirituality. Giovanni Miccoli was the 16th recipient of the medal. Recent honorees have included Fr. Clément Schmitt, O.F.M., Sr. Ingrid Peterson, O.S.F., Fr. Kenan Osborne, O.F.M., and Fr. Zachary Hayes, O.F.M. THE FRANCISCAN PROPOSAL OF GIOVANNI MICCOLI Giovanni Miccoli was born a little more than seventy years ago in the city of Trieste in northern Italy. He studied at the Scuola normale superiore of Pisa, the most prestigious school in Italy, where he was taught by renowned professors, particularly Arsenio Frugoni. He also received scholarships to study in Munich, Germany, and in London, England. Although he was offered a wide variety of important research and teaching positions in the major cities of Italy, he chose scholarly authority over academic power, and decided to return to his home town and join the university of Trieste, where he taught until his recent appointment as professor emeritus. Trieste is a city at the crossroads of the Latin, Germanic and Slavic worlds. Although largely ignored nowadays, in the past it was the harbor of Austria and, more recently during the Cold War, the last city of Western Europe facing the communist world. It is an enigmatic, fascinating city. This evening we honor Giovanni Miccoli as one of the greatest... (shrink)