Abstract

The epochal transition from the medieval to the modern world has long been thought in terms of the "infinitization" of the world-picture, that is, as the transition from the finite, hierarchically ordered medieval cosmos to the infinite and homogeneous universe of the new astronomy and physics. In this dissertation I argue that this process of "infinitization" must be understood intensively as well as extensively. Nature, in the modern age, is thought not only as infinitely extended in space, but also as exhibiting an infinite richness in all of its parts. Each individual being is grasped as utterly unique and consequently as conceptually inexponable. Thus the infinitization of the real leads to an infinitization of the knowable-- the radical shift in ontology grounds a corresponding shift in epistemology, so that the progress of human knowledge is understood as an unending project infinitely extended over time. ;I take as my point of departure a consideration of Hans Blumenberg's reading of this epochal transition in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Blumenberg views the transference of the attribute of infinity from God to the world as characteristic of the modern rejection of the medieval tendency to locate the measure of self- and world-understanding in a transcendent deity. The "worldliness" of the modern age, Blumenberg holds, must be understood as a reaction to the extreme intensification of divine transcendence in late medieval Nominalism. In the face of an absconded God, human "self-assertion" aims at the realization of this-worldly possibilities through the mastery and alteration of reality. I agree with Blumenberg that the primary expression of this self-assertion has been seen in the progress of modern science. The possibility of that progress, however, is grounded in an understanding of nature as a law-like and yet inexhaustible field of investigation directing thought toward an objectivity that is never entirely realized. The origin of such an understanding, I argue, is to be found in late medieval Neoplatonic speculation on the nature of God's omnipresence in the world, in particular in the notion of the immanence of the infinite in the finite