This paper explores the presence of late medieval ius commune in Grotius’s thought on the use of force in internal strife and war, based on De iure belli ac pacis. To this end, it examines Grotius’s use of ius commune sources, and considers some similar sources, which he does not actually cite, but which relate to his discussion. By clarifying Grotius’s selection and use of ius commune sources, the paper intends to contribute to the achievement of a double aim: (...) firstly, to determine the place of rebellion and civil war in De iure belli ac pacis, especially in relation to war; and, secondly, to assess Grotius’s approach to the two former issues, particularly with regard to the criteria by which a distinction between rebellion and civil war can be drawn, and to the effects of this distinction. (shrink)

This is the first investigation of timekeeping by the sun and stars and the regulation of the astronomically-defined times of Muslim prayer. The study is based on over 500 medieval astronomical manuscripts first identified by the author. A second volume and third volume, also published by Brill, deals with astronomical instruments for timekeeping and other computing devices.

A clash of civilizations has been perennial in human history, and today it is again taking the form of a more than thousand year old clash: The West and Islam. However, I want to argue that humanity now has the tools to transform that clash to cooperation, and not just occasionally, as in a few times and places in the past, dependent on the temporary benignity of a well-placed leader.

David A. King. In Synchrony with the Heavens: Studies in Astronomical Timekeeping and Instrumentation in Medieval Islamic Civilization. Volume 1: The Call of the Muezzin. 900 pp., index. Leiden/Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2004.; David A. King. In Synchrony with the Heavens: Studies in Astronomical Timekeeping and Instrumentation in Medieval Islamic Civilization. Volume 2: Instruments of Mass Calculation. lxxvi + 1,066 pp., figs., apps., index. Leiden/Boston: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and (...) made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (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)

This classic study by a distinguished scholar surveys the major philosophical trends and thinkers of a vital period in Western civilization. Based on Maurice DeWulf's celebrated Princeton University lectures, it offers an accessible view of medieval history, covering scholastic, ecclesiastic, classicist, and secular thought of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. From Anselm and Abelard to Thomas Aquinas and William of Occam, it chronicles the influence of the era's great philosophers on their contemporaries as well as on subsequent generations.

Saskia Sassen is an authority in the field of globalization studies, and has published widely on the political, economic and social dimensions of globalization, migration, global cities and new technologies. This interview explores how her work can contribute to political philosophy. In her most recent book, Territory, Authority, Rights: From Medieval to Global Assemblages (2008), she undercuts the common understanding of the nation-state as fading away. She demonstrates how globalization to a large extent takes place inside national institutions, thus (...) transforming the nation-state from within rather than simply replacing it or hollowing it out. In this interview, Sassen comments on the role of philosophy in her work and the relationship between academia and politics, and discusses the growing distance between the state and the citizen, capitalism and the land grabs, and how the powerless can make history and the political. (shrink)

There are varying opinions about whether or not the field of business ethics has a history or is a development of more modern times. It is suggested that a book by a Dominican Friar, Johannes Nider, De Contractibus Mercatorum, written ca. 1430 and published ca. 1468 provides a basis for a history of over 500 years. Business ethics grew out of attempts to reconcile Biblical precepts, canon law, civil law, the teachings of the Church Fathers, and the writings of early (...) philosophers with the realities of expanding economic activity. Nider's background is discussed as well as his book as an example of incunabula.Nider was one of the Scholastics who provided a link between Aristotle and later Reformation thinkers. In Nider we find caveat venditor as his moral guide to merchants as well as other surprisingly modern ideas such as justice in exchange; restitution for defective goods; the market as the final arbiter of value; and the importance of creating utility in products. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 41.2 (2003) 273-274 [Access article in PDF] Christoph Lüthy, John E. Murdoch, and William R. Newman, editors. Late Medieval and Early Modern Corpuscular Matter Theories. Leiden: Brill, 2001. Pp. viii + 610. Cloth, $186.00. The nineteen papers of this weighty (handsomely produced, but expensive) volume are mostly devoted to the views of one thinker or group of persons on "corpuscularism" (see 17ff.), (...) in either physics or mathematics, with few synthetic or diachronic studies. Only a quarter of the volume is devoted to the medieval period: Danielle Jacquart on minima in the Salerno school of medicine (twelfth century); the late George Molland on Roger Bacon's and Grosseteste's "corpuscular tendencies"; Charles Lohr on Ramon Lull; John Murdoch on minima naturalia in the medieval and Renaissance periods; and the greater part of William Newman's study of corpuscularian conceptions in "Aristotelian alchemy" from Geber to Sennert. The early-modern part includes studies on mostly expected figures: Francesco Patrici, Giordano Bruno, the Northumberland circle, Francis Bacon, David Gorlaeus (a little-known Dutch theology student; 1591-1612, sic), Daniel Sennert, Honoré Fabri, Galileo, Gassendi, Charleton, Boyle, Locke, and Homberg. Alan Gabbey more generally distinguishes different patterns of explanations in mechanical philosophy.As far as I can judge, the authors are knowledgeable and competent, and the studies make important contributions. But just because this is a high-quality volume produced with the ambition of making a step toward rewriting the history of a major chapter in the history of science, its two significant and principled deficiencies must be pointed out.The volume follows the intention of "show[ing] the debt of early-modern matter theory to previous traditions and thereby [explaining] its bewildering heterogeneity" (back cover). Now, the study of the corpuscular traditions in the pre-modern period is certainly an important desideratum (although this volume again attends chiefly to the early modern corpuscularians). But the motivation and perspective here announced—the medieval period [End Page 273] is to be studied because early modern science is indebted to it—are astoundingly Whiggish. Worse: the study of the entire Arabic-Islamic tradition is dismissed, on the grounds that "Islamic atomism does not seem to have been of any influence upon Christian fourteenth-century atomism" (8): this is not only Whiggism, but also frank and explicit euro- and Christian-centrism, which in the beginning of the twenty-first century is simply stunning. The method amusingly consists in affirming the consequent: presupposing that "Islamic atomism" did not influence the West and early-modern science, no scholar was asked to examine whether or not this was indeed the case, with the congenial result that the volume seemingly confirms the initial presupposition. Q.E.D. Similarly and no less regrettably, the fact that (ps.-) Geber's Summa Perfectionis is not, as Lasswitz had thought, the translation of an Arabic work is here used as grounds on which to dismiss altogether his claim concerning the importance of the Arabic input (13, but see also 293). This way, incomprehension between civilizations is reinforced instead of being reduced, and I believe we did not need September 11 to know this.The thusly dismissed Mu'tazilite school of Islamic theology had important repercussions in Judaism, so that referring to it as "Islamic atomism" is misleading (see notably Hagai Ben-Shammai, "Studies in Karaite Atomism," Jerusalem Studies in Arabic and Islam 6 [1985]: 243-93). The volume's forty-page cumulative bibliography, for which the editors are to be congratulated, reflects the volume's parochial viewpoint: H. A. Wolfson's important The Philosophy of the Kalam (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976), with some 150 pages on atomism, is not included; nor is the (English version of the) landmark study by the late S. Pines, Studies in Islamic Atomism (Jerusalem: The Magnes Press, 1997; the original 1936 German version is mentioned). Wolfson's study, incidentally, shows that the editors' presupposition (8) that the Kalâm tradition could have influenced the West only via the Latin translation of Maimonides' Guide of the Perplexed is unwarranted, for Isaac... (shrink)

Includes 28 illustrations of manuscripts, artwork, and architecture. Paperback edition ($16.95) not seen. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR.

An important aspect of the contemporary controversies over John Calvin’s natural law doctrine has been his relation to the medieval natural law inheritance. This paper attempts to put Calvin in better context through a detailed examination of his ideas on natural law, in comparison with those of Thomas Aquinas. I argue that significant points of both similarity and difference between them must berecognized. Among important similarities, I highlight their grounding of natural law in the divine nature and the relationship (...) of natural to civil law. Among important differences I note issues of participation, conscience, and the two kingdoms doctrine. Calvin resides in the same broad tradition of natural law as Thomas Aquinas, although he represents a somewhat different strand of it. (shrink)

Willing and Understanding elucidates a variety of issues in and approaches to debating the will-intellect interplay in the late Middle Ages. Authored by prominent scholars in the field, the contributions offer different perspectives on the development of late medieval theories of the will. Charting a dense map of voluntarist and epistemological ideas - entrenched leitmotifs of late medieval philosophy, seminal insights sparking original trends, and ephemeral novelties - the volume is a testimony to the conceptual multidimensionality and ethical (...) complexity of the past and present iterations of the debate on the will. Contributors are Pascale Bermon, Magdalena Bieniak, Michael W. Dunne, Riccardo Fedriga, Giacomo Fornasieri, Tobias Hoffmann, Severin V. Kitanov, Monika Michałowska, Riccardo Saccenti, Sonja Schierbaum, Michael Szlachta, Łukasz Tomanek, and Francesco Omar Zamboni. (shrink)

The subject of the analysis of this paper is the Andean civilization view by the Peruvian author of the XVI century Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, a Quechua Indian by origin, who became a Catholic monk, as well as a translator and mediator between two civilizations: European, personalized by Spanish administration and Catholic Church present in the conquered lands, and Andean civilization, represented by local population speaking native Quechua and other Native American languages. The collision of two worlds is clearly (...) visible in the Chronicle «El primer nueva corónica y buen gobierno», which belongs to this author. This literary monument is an invaluable document because it describes in Medieval Spanish a disappearing world left behind, due to the lack of writing, having only artifacts of material culture and proto-hieroglyphic recording tools. The main methods of this research – analysis, synthesis, generalization. Analyzing the statements of the author of the Chronicle, who is trying to reconcile the two worlds, it is possible to recreate the panorama of the life of Andean society of that era and the sociolinguistic situation developed in it. The novelty of the study can be considered the combination of cultural and sociolinguistic approaches in the analysis of the material. The conclusion reached by the authors of the article is that the death of the Andean civilization was inevitable under the onslaught of the European one. But the Andean world, native languages and culture have not disappeared, and today are being revived, since the Peruvian society has formed a request to restore the social functions of native languages in full. (shrink)

Early contractarians such as Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau stretched the idea of contract to encompass all realms of society: the political, the economic, the familial. Contract is still a fundamental concept for many modern disciplines; indeed, it names fields in political philosophy, in economics, and in law. There was no such governing notion of contract in the fourteenth century, no metaphor of exchange that could link together ideas about agency, conditions, profit, and responsibility from different disciplines and provide a (...) theory of the basis of society itself. Retrospectively it may seem that scattered ideas about contract were, in fact, being developed: for instance, by the common law in the actions called debt, covenant, and trespass; by constitutional theory, in conciliarism; by economic thought, in a miscellany of glosses and laws redressing fraud and regulating prices and markets; by theology, in discussions of will, intention, and the marriage sacrament; by the civil law, in Roman law of contract; and by canon law, in treatments of individual consent and incapacity in marriage. Yet nothing about this discontinuous hodgepodge predicts that a fundamental connection among those topics will emerge in later political theory. To find a powerful combination of social analysis and political philosophy that takes up the issues deliberated by the later contractarians, we can call upon a medieval allegorist. (shrink)

This text focuses on why the global spread of formal rationality contributes to a critical spirit which undermines human values and beliefs, be they ancient, medieval, modern and now postmodern. This is so in special relation to the model of the seven major dimensions of human existence: the True (knowledge), the Holy (religion), the Good (morals), the Just (justice), the Everyday (consumeristic culture), the Technological (technophilic culture), and the Beautiful (arts and literature). This not only has happened in the (...) Eastern world but is spreading to the civilizations of the non-West as well. When carried to its logical conclusion, this undermining will yield what the author refers to as the post-human consciousness after postmodernity, in that humans are nothing in the end, to be someday superseded by post-humans. (shrink)

Study of the changing nature of the perception of an action and the action itself, and how thought-processes altered radically in the Middle Ages"--Provided by publisher.

History can be understood as involving a problematic interplay between the long-term legacy of human evolution, still tempered into the human body today, and the shorter-term heritage of civilization from its beginnings to the present. Each of us lives in a tension between our indigenous bodies and our civilized selves, between the philosophy of the earth and that which I characterize as “the philosophy of escape from the earth.” The standard story of civilization is one of linear upward progress, a (...) story that I contest with an alternative philosophy of history, picturing history instead as a set of concentric circles. I have devised a new philosophy of history with a three-part approach to understanding human development, taking civilization not as a linear advance of progress, but rather as a progress in precision, paradoxically counteracted by a regression in mind: history as a contraction of mind. I describe three stages in the contraction of mind: 1) animate mind as the evolved outlook of foraging life; 2) anthropocentric mind as representing the contracting transformation of consciousness produced by agriculturally-based civilization; 3) mechanico-centric mind as representing a further contraction from human-centered to a machine-centered consciousness, produced by the rise of modern civilization and the mechanical scientific worldview. Hence, this progressive contraction is marked by a turn from original practical and reverential attunement to the living earth in hunting and gathering societies, or animate mind, to a narrower focus of anthropocentric mind beginning with the development of early civilizations, where the human element became central and the wild devalued. And it moves to an even more narrow focus of mechanico-centric mind, expanding out of late medieval Europe and the development of modern science, where the machine became model of the ultimate, the objectivist filter through which the world is to be understood and made to fit. Far from controlling nature, humans have been consuming it in an unsustainable Malthusian-like trajectory whose limits are being reached in our time. (shrink)

© The Author. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: [email protected] Fromherz has already written a very useful book on the Almohads, and he now attempts to set his work on their remarkable empire within a much wider setting, from the seventh century, when Islam reached the Maghreb, all the way to the fifteenth century, and in the entire western Mediterranean. His thesis is that we should (...) think of western Mediterranean civilization in the Middle Ages as a shared culture and experience, embracing the much-ignored history of what are now Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia alongside the study of Spanish, Italian and other histories, predominantly Christian. Close attention to the Christian shores of the western Mediterranean has, he avers, created a narrative of worlds apart: Christians on the northern flanks who had little in common... (shrink)

In this article, the identification in different civilizations and eras of some cir-umpolar stars as the north pole star are reviewed, the main principles behind and crucial considerations in the past for forming the criteria for north pole star identification are scrutinized, and some profound differences in ancient and medieval views of it are discussed. The point of departure is the identification of the north polar star in Euclid’s Phaenomena as the star HR 4646, and its identification in the (...) Pahlavi Bundahišn and al-Ṣūfī’s Ṣuwar al-kawākib as HR 4893. Because of the inevitable transitory nature of the north pole star, the location of al-Ṣūfī’s north pole star in the manuscript tradition of his magnum opus during the centuries after him is also investigated in detail. A supplementary discussion is included on the confusion between two different entities—the pole of the celestial sphere and the pivot of an indigenous Arabic asterism envisioned as a millstone—in philological, lexical, and literary Islamic works, which chiefly stems from the vague terminology employed. (shrink)

In contemporary political discourse, the "clash of civilizations" rhetoric often undergirds philosophical analyses of "democracy" both at home and abroad. This is nowhere better articulated than in Jacques Derrida's Rogues, in which he describes Islam as the only religious or theocratic culture that would "inspire and declare any resistance to democracy". Curiously, Derrida attributes the failings of democracy in Islam to the lack of reference to Aristotle's Politics in the writings of the medieval Muslim philosophers. This paper aims to (...) analyze this gross misconception of Islamic philosophy and illuminate the thoroughgoing influence the Muslim philosophers had on their Christian successors, those who are so often credited as foundations of Western political philosophy. In so doing, I compare the ideal states presented by Averroes and Dante – in which Aristotelian influence is intimately interlaced – and offer an analysis thereof as heralds of what we might call the secularization of the political, inspiring those democratic values that Derrida believes to be absent in the rich philosophy of the Middle Ages. (shrink)

This short article was originally delivered as a lecture in China, The article sketches a process view of history from ancient to medieval civilization, to modernity in two major phases, and to the current transition to a constructive postmodern, ecological civilization.

In this first volume of a new series, "Duke Monographs in Medieval and Renaissance Studies," three independently published essays by Professor Kristeller have been gathered together in one volume. Though originally written for different occasions, all three develop the theme expressed by the title, that is, "the continued presence of medieval traits in the civilization of the Renaissance". As Kristeller himself explains in the Preface, the presence of medieval traits in the Renaissance does not militate against the (...) acknowledged reality of many nonmedieval and even antimedieval features of this same period. Nonetheless, recognition of these medieval characteristics is of great value for a fuller appreciation of the Renaissance, as each of these essays illustrates in its own way. (shrink)

The different ways in which the three medieval societies of Byzantium, Latin Christendom, and Islam institutionalized the charitable impulse present in their respective faiths reflected the fundamentally different religious values which motivated these civilizations as well as their different levels of material and intellectual development. All three societies exalted the relief of human suffering, especially the care of the sick, as a religiously sanctioned gesture; and all three invented or adopted institutional means for attaining this pious objective. The various (...) medieval counterparts of the modern “hospital”—the Byzantine nosocomeion or xenodocheion, the European hospitale, and the Islamic maristan—differed significantly, however, with respect to their organization and operation, the clientele which they served, and the ultimate intent of their charitable efforts. Accordingly, a comparison of these social welfare institutions reveals the contrasting ways in which the two Christendoms and Islam defined and applied the ideals of “piety” and “charity” during the middle ages. (shrink)

In this paper, I try to explore Bennabi’s contribution to social theory, his views and the approach he developed in dealing with issues concerning human society and civilization. I also try to show his efforts to build a huge theory that would apply to every human society, and to encircle all of civilization. Because Bennabi was raised in circumstances that appeared to confirm the military, scientific, economic and political superiority of the west. He tried to analyse and define the causes (...) ofmuslim failure. As a response to western colonialism. Bennabi supported the idea of providing the Muslims with means of self-defense and self-justification, instead of merely transforming the immediate social conditions of the people. Besides, Bennabi was excited by the historical experience of Japan, which had been brought from the medieval to the modern age in only fifty years. Despite Muslims and Japanese similar had attempted to learn from Western civilization, the Japanese alone had refused to borrow the destructive ideas of the west and remained faithful to their culture and history. (shrink)

In addressing not only the Conciliarist controversy of his day but issues of civil and ecclesiastical government and challenges to the Church, from reform movements to the division between Catholic...

Ranging chronologically from the twelfth to the fifteenth century and thematically from Latin to vernacular literary modes, this book challenges standard assumptions about the musical cultures and philosophies of the European Middle Ages. Engaging a wide range of premodern texts and contexts, from the musicality of sodomy in twelfth-century polyphony to Chaucer's representation of pedagogical violence in the Prioress's Tale, from early Christian writings on the music of the body to the plainchant and poetry of Hildegard of Bingen, the author (...) argues that medieval music was quintessentially a practice of the flesh. The book reveals a medieval world in which erotic desire, sexual practice, torture, flagellation, and even death itself resonated with musical significance and meaning. In its insistence on music as an integral part of the material cultures of the Middle Ages, the book presents a revisionist account of an important aspect of premodern European civilization. (shrink)

In "Knowledge Triumphant," Franz Rosenthal observes that the Islamic civilization is one that is essentially characterized by knowledge ("'ilm"), for "ilm is ...

SummaryIn this article, I examine friendship as a subject of political theory rather than as a social practice relevant to political life. As suggested by Francesco d'Altobianco Alberti in the poem recited at the first certame coronario, two ideas of political friendship existed side by side in Medicean Florence. They appeared in full in Palmieri's Vita civile and in Platina's De optimo cive. As I will show, the Ciceronian language of friendship is used in these works to resolve two key (...) problems of Renaissance political thought: the need for political unity and the just way of appointing the governing elite. Palmieri placed friendship in the political sphere of concord: he was a republican imperialist who believed that civic friendship protected the political unity of the city, without which Florence would not have been able to expand. Platina, on the other hand, situated friendship in the political sphere of counsel: his concern was to support the selection of the most virtuous and knowledgeable citizens, worthy of access to public office. While Palmieri looked back to the city's medieval past, Platina cast light on the politics of friendship that allowed the Medici to stay in power. (shrink)