The present volume completes the cataloguing of manuscripts. This impressive undertaking will be concluded with one further volume, which will contain addenda and extensive indexes to all the volumes. `a remarkable achievement of scholarship...The descriptions of the manuscripts are full and at the same time admirably concise...Any user of the work, whether his interests are palaeographical, iconographical, or textual, will be deeply grateful for the wealth of information contained in this volume'. Review of English Studies`will be invaluable not (...) only for reference but for the comprehensive and immensely precise assurance that it will give to scholars in every field of medieval studies that nothing relevant to their purposes now lurks in unrecorded concealment'. English Historical Review. (shrink)

The four volumes of Neil Ker's Medieval Manuscripts in British Libraries were published by Oxford University Press between 1969 and 1992. They comprise a catalogue of about 3,000 manuscripts in Latin and Western European vernaculars in hitherto uncatalogued or inadequately catalogued institutional collections in the United Kingdom and form a major research tool for humanist scholars. The index volume, produced under the direction of A. G. Watson, a former pupil of Ker's and now his literary executor, and (...) I. C. Cunningham, formerly Keeper of Manuscripts in the National Library of Scotland, provides a variety of indexes, including authors/titles; owners; geographical origins and dates of manuscripts; vernacular manuscripts; Latin and vernacular incipits; manuscripts cited; repertories cited; and iconography. There are also lists of recent accessions to libraries and of manuscripts that have migrated from one institution to another. (shrink)

Perceptions of Medieval Manuscripts takes as its starting point an understanding that a medieval book is a whole object at every point of its long history. As such, medieval books can be studied most profitably in a holistic manner as objects-in-the-world. This means readers might profitably account for all aspects of the manuscript in their observations, from the main texts that dominate the codex to the marginal notes, glosses, names, and interventions made through time. This holistic (...) approach allows us to tell the story of the book's life from the moment of its production to its use, collection, breaking-up, and digitization--all aspects of what can be termed 'dynamic architextuality'. The ten chapters include detailed readings of texts that explain the processes of manuscript manufacture and writing, taking in invisible components of the book that show the joy and delight clearly felt by producers and consumers. Chapters investigate the filling of manuscripts' blank spaces, presenting some texts never examined before, and assessing how books were conceived and understood to function. Manuscripts' heft and solidness can be seen, too, in the depictions of miniature books in medieval illustrations. Early manuscripts thus become archives and witnesses to individual and collective memories, best read as 'relics of existence', as Maurice Merleau-Ponty describes things. As such, it is urgent that practices fragmenting the manuscript through book-breaking or digital display are understood in the context of the book's wholeness. Readers of this study will find chapters on multiple aspects of medieval bookness in the distant past, the present, and in the assurance of the future continuity of this most fascinating of cultural artefacts. (shrink)

The Works and Days is contained in far more manuscripts than the other Hesiodic poems. Altogether there are something over 260, as against seventyodd for the Theogony and sixty-odd for the Shield. Over a hundred of them are later than 1480, the approximate date of the earliest printed edition of the poem; but even when these are subtracted, a formidable number remains, many of which have never been investigated. The present century has seen more done in the way of (...) cataloguing them than the nineteenth, but less in the way of collating them. Since N. A. Livadaras published his list of Hesiod manuscripts in 1963, the disparity between what has been done and what might be done has become more apparent than ever before. (shrink)

This second volume contains commentaries on the Latin Aristotle from the University Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the college libraries of the University of Cambridge. This is the second of a projected series of four volumes describing manuscripts and fragments in British libraries containing commentaries on the Latin Aristotle. This volume covers the University Library, the Fitzwilliam Museum, and the college libraries of the University of Cambridge. It lists 152 items , dating from the tenth century until c. 1500. (...) While a few of these manuscripts came to Cambridge after the Reformation, the majority were already in use in the medieval University. Not many have been adequately described before, while most of the anonymous commentaries have not been listed anywhere. Four indexes are provided to facilitate searching the main text. (shrink)

I have been surveying the spelling across a range of the manuscripts; my findings are given under “Profiles” at the end. The method I have used is to find the word by electronic search in my computer files, then find corresponding places in the MSS. If abbreviation conceals the spelling I search further. This method does not guarantee that the spelling I find at some place in a MS is used throughout the MS; indeed in some cases I have (...) noticed variations. All I claim is that at least sometimes the word is spelled that way in that MS. Because photocopy of some MSS is not available to me at present or is illegible, my survey of the MSS is not complete. (shrink)

“The expression ‘free logic’ is an abbreviation for the phrase ‘free of existence assumptions with respect to its terms, general and singular’.”1 Classical quantification theory is not a free logic in this sense, as its standard formulations commonly assume that every singular term in every model is assigned a referent, an element of the universe of discourse. Indeed, since singular terms include not only singular constants, but also variables2, standard quantification theory may be regarded as involving even the assumption of (...) the existence of the values of its variables, in accordance with Quine’s famous dictum: “to be is to be the value of a variable”. (shrink)

Usually thoughts are not in isolation but in varing degrees have interrelations with each other. With regard to this historical fact as a classist want to explore the reception of a few medieval Arabic texts and writers of Socrates available teachings about politics.

This is cassette 12, concerned with more connexions between late medieval and early modern thought. The first writer we will look at is George Berkeley, who criticised Locke's theory of abstract ideas and put forward his own theory of universality.

With regard to the new directions in the Humanities, here I am going to consider and examine the approach of al-Farabi as a medieval thinker in introducing a new outlook to “language” in difference with the other views. Thereby, I will explore his challenges in the frame of “philosophical humanism” as a term given by Arkoun (1970) and Kraemer (1984) to the humanism of the Islamic philosophers and their circles, mainly in the tenth and eleventh centuries. Al-Farabi’s conception of (...) philosophical humanism, in which philosophy is thick and religion is thin, makes its agony with the other versions of humanism and also orthodox Islam. It means that his introduction of a humanistic understanding of language should be placed in such a multi-level contested environment. According to al-Farabi, language as a universal category has relation with reason that logic should function as its proper instrument. As a result, there is no specific privileged predetermined language, but the position of any language is shaped by its relation with human reason and formal logic that is something human-made. And such a conception means language in human terms. Key Terms: Al-Farabi; Language; Philosophical Humanism; Arabic: Greek . (shrink)

We rebut Pappas’ critique (this issue) of our treatment of Late Medieval Greek clausal syntax and clitic placement (Condoravdi & Kiparsky 2001), point out some weaknesses of his counterproposal, and suggest directions for further research.

The Cambridge History of Later Medieval Philosophy (CHOLMP) brings together in one volume an impressively large number (47) of short essays (averaging 18 pages) by an impressively large number (41) of able scholars. The final product, sad to report, is something less than impressive.

Descartes (1596-1650) is generally regarded as the first of the modern philosophers. Indeed, until about 50 years ago most philosophers would have said that Descartes was the first significant philosopher since Aristotle. Descartes himself does not draw attention to his sources--not to conceal them (that would have been pointless, because to his contemporaries the continuities of his thought with the books they had all been brought up on would have been obvious), but so as to avoid getting embroiled in learned (...) disputes about who had said what and what they had meant. Descartes wanted his readers to look at his arguments and judge them by using their own intelligence. He calls on his readers to empty their minds of prejudices, i.e. previous judgments, and take a fresh look. His writings had such an impact that philosophy after Descartes generally took his arguments and positions as a starting point or as a point of reference, and earlier writers were no longer read. (There was a social reason for this also: philosophical books were, after Descartes set the example, generally addressed in French or some other vernacular language to lay readers outside the universities, and most readers could not easily read the Latin authors Descartes had himself read when he was a student of the Jesuits.) So it came to be thought that Descartes had had no significant predecessors--that all of his ideas were original. Descartes was indeed an original thinker, but he used a good deal of medieval material. In this lecture I want to go through Descartes' chief work in philosophy, The Meditations , outlining the argument and drawing attention to the medieval material. (shrink)

It is a commonplace in the historiography of medieval philosophy that theology represents philosophy's culmination in the later Middle Ages, and specifically, that it is in the work of theologians and theologically-trained Arts Masters that we find philosophy in its purest and most advanced form. By comparison, the philosophy produced by thinkers who worked exclusively or primarily in the Faculty of Arts is seen as inferior -- by which is usually meant that it is shallow, unsophisticated, immature, and driven (...) by disparate curricular and pedagogical concerns rather than by the more single-minded commitment to rationally articulate that sacred doctrine which, as Aquinas says, "extends [by virtue of its oneness] to things which belong to different philosophical sciences.". (shrink)

Scholarship in Heideggerian philosophy can be broadly differentiated into three groups, which evolved in the European and Anglo-American discourses after WWII, namely, first a transcendental (idealist Kantian) approach; second, an Aristotelian approach; and third, a Christian approach to Heidegger’s analytic of Dasein and his fundamental ontology. All of these basic positions are a result of Heidegger’s philosophy on his way to Being and Time (1927) which he developed both in his broad ranging and fascinating lecture courses in Freiburg, where he (...) taught as Husserl’s assistant between 1917 and 1923, and in Marburg, where he taught between 1923 and 1927 (before he returned to Freiburg in 1928 as Husserl’s successor). Interestingly, the analytic reception of Heidegger focuses on Heidegger’s main work Being and Time, whereas the European and “Continental” discourse is oriented towards larger issues, which include philosophical anthropology, theology, hermeneutics, and the history of philosophy. McGrath’s study belongs to the theologically motivated studies on Heidegger’s phenomenology and ontology and thereby contributes to the recent renewed interest in Heidegger’s early philosophy, which arose after his early lecture courses were published in his Collected Works and after it became clear that Heidegger’s way to Being and Time (and his later thinking) not only was heavily influenced by Scholasticism, especially by Duns Scotus, but also by Augustine, Eckhart, and Luther, all of which took effect before Heidegger encountered Husserl’s phenomenology, Neo-Kantianism or Aristotle’s philosophy. The greatness of Being and Time is indeed a result of the ingenious transformation of all these sources into something new. (shrink)

The manuscript tradition of the Theogony is not as good as that of the Erga, a poem which has always been more popular. The earliest complete manuscripts of the Theogony date only from the end of the thirteenth century, while those upon which the recensio must chiefly be based are of the fourteenth and fifteenth. The number of extant manuscripts, however, especially of the fifteenth century, is not inconsiderable, and knowledge of them has hitherto been far from complete. (...) What is known is known largely in consequence of the labours of Alois Rzach. Rzach collated many of the manuscripts, and tried, with some success, to establish the relationships between them. He published his conclusions in Wiener Studien xix, 15–70, and used them as the basis for his great edition of 1902. (shrink)

This book includes a study of writers on mysticism, mystics and mysticism for world religions and the nature and stages of the mystical journey. This contents show some of the mystic studied - I. Mystics of The Ancient Past -/- Pre-history Of Mysticism Vedic Hymnists Early Egyptians The Early Jews Upanishadic Seers Kapila The Bhagavad Gita The Taoist Sages The Buddha -/- II. Mystics of The Greco-Roman Era -/- The Pre-Socratic Greeks Socrates And His Successors Zeno of Citium Philo Judaeus (...) Jesus of Nazareth Early Christians The Gnostics The Hermetics Plotinus III. Mystics of The Early Middle Ages -/- Pseudo-Dionysius Narada Patanjali The Tantra Shankara Dattatreya Milarepa The Ch’an And Zen Buddhists The Sufis Al-Hallaj -/- IV. Mystics of The Late Middle Ages -/- Jewish Mysticism Ibn Arabi Iraqi Rumi Jnaneshvar Medieval Christians Meister Eckhart Thomas á Kempis -/- V. Mystics of The Modern Era -/- Nicholas of Cusa Juan de la Cruz (St. John of the Cross) Kabir Nanak Dadu Seventeenth And Eighteenth Century Mystics Sri Ramakrishna Ramana Maharshi Swami Rama Tirtha Twentieth Century Mystics Conclusion . (shrink)

One large exception to this generalisation is John Scottus Eriugena, who wrote original philosophical works, and also produced some translations of philosophical works. "Eriugena" is his rendering into Greek of "Scottus", which at that time meant Irish: John the Irishman. He was born in Ireland about AD 810, lived and wrote in France from about 840; he was one of the Irish and English clergy attracted to France by the Carolingian renaissance. He mastered Greek; knowledge of Greek was rare in (...) western Europe before the Renaissance of the fourteenth century, but at most times during the middle ages there were some Latin-speaking Europeans who also knew Greek. He translated from Greek into Latin the works of Dionysios the Areopagite: the Mystical Theology , the Divine Names and the Celestial Hierarchy. Dionysios the Areopagite is mentioned in the bible, in Acts 17:34; he was one of the few converts Paul made when he visited Athens. In France it was believed that this Dionysios had travelled to Gaul to preach Christianity, and that he had founded the Abbey of St. Denys in Paris. His writings were held in great respect. Unfortunately they are not authentic. Modern scholars refer to their author as pseudo-Dionysios ("pseudo" meaning "false"), or as Dionysios the pseudo-Areopagite: perhaps his name was Dionysios, but he was not the "Areopagite" mentioned in the bible. His writings are a Christianised version of Proclus and are therefore yet another channel of neo-Platonic influence on medieval Latin thought. John's own philosophical writings, which are also in the neo-Platonic style, did not have much influence on later medieval thinkers. For an account of them see E. Gilson, History of Christian Philosophy in the Middle Ages. (shrink)

Some notes discussing some of the ancient and medieval background to the absolute-relational debate. Final version appears as Appendix C in my book, Geometric Possibility.

We come to the full possession of our power of drawing inferences, the last of all our faculties; for it is not so much a natural gift as a long and difficult art. The history of its practice would make a grand subject for a book. The medieval schoolmen, following the Romans, made logic the earliest of a boy's studies after grammar, as being very easy. So it was as they understood it. Its fundamental principle, according to them, was, (...) that all knowledge rests either on authority or reason; but that whatever is deduced by reason depends ultimately on a premiss derived from authority. Accordingly, as soon as a boy was perfect in the syllogistic procedure, his intellectual kit of tools was held to be complete. (shrink)

In this paper I consider the way in which divinity is realized through an imaginary locus in the mystical thought of Jewish kabbalah and Hindu tantra. It demonstrates a reflective consciousness by the adept or master in understanding the place of God’s being, as a supernal and mundane reality. For the comparative assessment of these two distinctive approaches I shall use as a point of departure the interpretative strategies employed by Elliot Wolfson in his detailed work on Jewish mysticism. He (...) argues that there is an androcentric bias embedded in the speculative outlook of medieval kabbalah, as he reads the texts through a psychoanalytic lens. In a similar way, I will argue that there is an androcentric bias to the speculations presented in medieval Shaiva tantra, in particular that division known as the Trika. Overall, my aim is to suggest some functional and perhaps structural similarities to the characterization of divinity in these two traditions, through brief analyses of the erotic understanding of the nature of the Godhead. (shrink)

Note: The Soka Gakkei (The Value Creating Society) is the largest lay Buddhist Organization in the world. They are one of 200 Buddhists sects in Japan that follow the medieval monk Nichiren’s exclusive focus on the Lotus Sutra . Daisaku Ikeda, scholar and..

Empiricists are in general rather suspicious with respect to any kind of abstract entities like properties, classes, relations, numbers, propositions, etc. They usually feel much more in sympathy with nominalists than with realists (in the medieval sense). As far as possible they try to avoid any reference to abstract entities and to restrict themselves to what is sometimes called a nominalistic language, i.e., one not containing such references. However, within certain scientific contexts it seems hardly possible to avoid them. (...) In the case of mathematics some empiricists try to find a way out by treating the whole of mathematics as a mere calculus, a formal system for which no interpretation is given, or can be given. Accordingly, the mathematician is said to speak not about numbers, functions and infinite classes but merely about meaningless symbols and formulas manipulated according to given formal rules. In physics it is more difficult to shun the suspected entities because the language of physics serves for the communication of reports and predictions and hence cannot be taken as a mere calculus. A physicist who is suspicious of abstract entities may perhaps try to declare a certain part of the language of physics as uninterpreted and uninterpretable, that part which refers to real numbers as space-time coordinates or as values of physical magnitudes, to functions, limits, etc. More probably he will just speak about all these things like anybody else but with an uneasy conscience, like a man who in his everyday life does with qualms many things which are not in accord with the high moral principles he professes on Sundays. Recently the problem of abstract entities has arisen again in connection with semantics, the theory of meaning and truth. Some semanticists say that certain expressions designate certain entities, and among these designated entities they include not only concrete material things but also abstract entities e.g., properties as designated by predicates and propositions as designated.... (shrink)

The lectures presented here are the by-product of my teaching in Yale's Directed Studies program from 1991 through 1993 (hence the title, for want of a better). In fact, being what they are, lecture notes for an introductory philosophy course, they present rather elementary material. Yet, I flatter myself, they do not lack certain originality in the treatment of some of the basic questions of traditional metaphysics and epistemology. In any case, over the past couple of years they proved to (...) be quite useful in teaching my several other courses, especially in medieval philosophy. Thus, being too elementary for transforming them into scholarly papers, on the one hand, yet, containing what I think to be both philosophically interesting and pedagogically useful ideas, on the other, I decided to publish them here, in the Net's formally less stringent medium. Here they can easily be accessed by people who think what they need is a clear and simple discussion of the intriguing philosophical points themselves, rather than the meticulous and sometimes cumbersome scholarly discussions of the texts that raised them (a description which fits, at least, the majority of my students). Given these considerations (as well as the author's lack of time), the lectures are presented here basically unedited, in the form as they were actually delivered, without any notes or references (disregarding the occasionally inserted page numbers, serving as reminders for myself, referring to the texts we used in class). However, anyone who is interested in the more detailed scholarly discussion of some of the topics touched upon here may wish to check some of the papers listed on my.. (shrink)