The doctrine of God’s absolute simplicity denies the possibility of real distinctions in God. It is, e.g., impossible that God have any kind of parts or any intrinsic accidental properties, or that there be real distinctions among God’s essential properties or between any of them and God himself. After showing that some of the counter-intuitive implications of the doctrine can readily be made sense of, the authors identify the apparent incompatibility of God’s simplicity and God’s free choice as a special (...) difficulty and associate it with two others: the apparent incompatibilities between essential omnipotence and essential goodness, and between perfect goodness and moral goodness. Since all three of these difficulties are associated with a certain understanding of the nature of God’s will, the authors base their resolution of them on an account of will in general and of God’s will in particular, drawing on Aquinas’s theory of will.Taking creation as their paradigm of divine free choice, the authors develop a solution of the principal incompatibility based on three claims: God’s acts of choice are both free and conditionally necessitated; the difference between absolutely and conditionallynecessitated acts of will is not a real distinction in God; and the conditional necessity of God’s acts of will is compatible with contingency in the objects of those acts. The heart of their solution consists in their attempt to make sense of and support those claims.The authors extend their solution to cover the two associated apparent incompatibilities as well.The article concludes with observations on the importance of the doctrine of God’s absolute simplicity for resolving problems in religious morality and in the cosmological argument. (shrink)

Norman Kretzmann expounds and criticizes Aquinas's theology of creation, which is `natural' in that Aquinas developed it without depending on the data of Scripture. Because of the special importance of intellective creatures like us, Aquinas's account of the divine origin and organization of the universe includes essential ingredients of his philosophy of mind. The Metaphysics of Creation is a continuation of the project Kretzmann began in The Metaphysics of Theism; as before, he not only explains Aquinas's natural theology, but advocates (...) it as the best available to us. (shrink)

The definitive study of the natural theology of Thomas Aquinas, the greatest medieval philosopher, written by one of the world's most eminent scholars of medieval thought.

The Metaphysics of Theism is the definitive study of the natural theology of Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of medieval philosophers, written by one of the world's most eminent scholars of medieval thought. Natural theology is the investigation by analysis and rational argument of fundamental questions about reality, considered in relation to God. Professor Kretzmann shows the continuing value of Aquinas's doctrines to the philosophical enterprise today; he argues that natural theology offers the only route by which philosophers can, as philosophers, (...) approach theological propositions, and that the one presented in this book is the best available natural theology. (shrink)

This is the first of a three-volume anthology intended as a companion to The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy. Volume 1 is concerned with the logic and the philosophy of language, and comprises fifteen important texts on questions of meaning and inference that formed the basis of Medieval philosophy. As far as is practicable, complete works or topically complete segments of larger works have been selected. The editors have provided a full introduction to the volume and detailed introductory headnotes (...) to each text; the volume is also indexed comprehensively. (shrink)

It is hard to overestimate the importance of the work of Augustine of Hippo, both in his own period and in the subsequent history of Western philosophy. Until the thirteenth century, when he may have had a competitor in Thomas Aquinas, he was the most important philosopher of the medieval period. Many of his views, including his theory of the just war, his account of time and eternity, his understanding of the will, his attempted resolution of the problem of evil, (...) and his approach to the relation of faith and reason, have continued to be influential up to the present time. In this 2001 volume of specially-commissioned essays, sixteen scholars provide a wide-ranging and stimulating contribution to our understanding of Augustine, covering all the major areas of his philosophy and theology. (shrink)

_William of Sherwood's Introduction to Logic _ was first published in 1966. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The _Introduction to Logic _ by William of Sherwood, of which this is the first English translation, is the oldest surviving treatise which contains a treatment of the most distinctive and interesting medieval contributions to logic and semantics. Sherwood was a master at Oxford (...) and Paris in the thirteenth century and the author of several logical treatises. Besides presenting material of interest in its own right, this volume is useful as an introduction to the study of those aspects of medieval philosophy that are most pertinent to the interests of contemporary philosophers. Professor Kretzmann has provided biographical, bibliographical, and philosophical backgrounds on Sherwood and an analytical table of contents. (shrink)

Among the great philosophers of the Middle Ages Aquinas is unique in pursuing two apparently disparate projects. On the one hand he developed a philosophical understanding of Christian doctrine in a fully integrated system encompassing all natural and supernatural reality. On the other hand, he was convinced that Aristotle's philosophy afforded the best available philosophical component of such a system. In a relatively brief career Aquinas developed these projects in great detail and with an astonishing degree of success. In this (...) volume ten leading scholars introduce all the important aspects of Aquinas' thought, ranging from its historical background and dependence on Greek, Islamic, and Jewish philosophy and theology, through the metaphysics, epistemology and ethics, to the philosophical approach to Biblical commentary. (shrink)

The Metaphysics of Theism is the definitive study of the natural theology of Thomas Aquinas, the greatest of medieval philosophers, written by one of the world's most eminent scholars of medieval thought. Natural theology is the investigation by analysis and rational argument of fundamental questions about reality, considered in relation to God. Professor Kretzmann shows the continuing value of Aquinas's doctrines to the philosophical enterprise today; he argues that natural theology offers the only route by which philosophers can, as philosophers, (...) approach theological propositions, and that the one presented in this book is the best available natural theology. (shrink)

The authors try to show that many of the differences between Ross and themselves are only apparent, masking considerable agreement. Among the real disagreements, at least one is over the interpretation of Aquinas’s account of divine simplicity, but the mostcentral disagreement consists in the authors’ claim that their concern was not with a distinction between the way God is and the way he might have been but with the difference between the way God is necessarily and the way he is (...) contingently. Finally, the authors argue that the concept of simplicity is indeed required for the solution of the problems discussed at the end of their original article. (shrink)

_William of Sherwood's Treatise on Syncategorematic Words _was first published in 1968. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. This is the first translation of an important medieval work in philosophy, an advanced treatise by the thirteenth-century English logician William of Sherwood. The treatise draws on doctrines developed in Sherwood's _Introduction to Logic_,which has also been translated by Professor Kretzmann. William of Sherwood (...) is an important figure in the development of the _logica moderna_,the distinctively medieval contribution to logic and semantics. As Professor Kretzmann explains, the _logica moderna _ may have originally aimed only ad providing _ad hoc _rules regarding inferences that involve problematic locutions of ordinary discourse. But its principal aim soon became the development of a more or less general account of the ways in which words are used to stand for things or to affect the meanings of other words. In Sherwood's time the _logica moderna _ seems to have been thought of as having two branches, an account of the "properties of terms" and an account of the signification and function of "syncategorematic words." Sherwood deals with the first branch in his _Introduction to Logic _ and with the second branch in the treatise presented here. The translation is copiously annotated to supply the kind of explanatory material a twentieth-century reader may need for an understanding of a thirteenth-century discussion. As Professor Kretzmann points out, many of the problems dealt with in this treatise closely resemble the problems of twentieth-century philosophical logic and philosophy of language. (shrink)