This is a study of D. H. Th. Vollenhoven’s type-focused historiography of philosophy and its development with respect to pre-Socratic philosophy. It uses the work of Pierre Hadot on philosophical askesis, the work of Martha Nussbaum on therapeutic argument, and recent work on the transformative character of Aquinas’s Summa contra Gentiles and Summa theologiae to question some of the central assumptions of Vollenhoven’s methodology. In the process, Vollenhoven’s practice is compared to and contrasted with the historiographical practice of Aristotle in (...) his Metaphysics. What emerges is a way to acknowledge the continued worth of type-focused reading and the religious intuitions that gave rise to it, but on the basis of different methodological assumptions and to different historiographical effects. (shrink)

In this monograph, Antonie Vos Jaczn surveys John Duns Scotus's theological thought, with an eye to its potential impact upon the future of Christian theology. His survey is constructed as a far ranging tour which ends, as it were, at its beginning. In chapters 1-2.1 he sketches in the societal, institutional, and biographical circumstances of Scotus's life and thought. In 2.2 he takes on the complex of problems inhering in the difficult and confused character of extant literary witnesses to his (...) thought. In the process, he argues persuasively for the hermeneutical priority of the Lectura when attempting to reconstruct and represent Scotus's authentic doctrine. (shrink)