James of Viterbo (ca. 1255–1307), Augustinian friar, master of theology at the University of Paris, and archbishop of Naples, was one of the leading philosophers and theologians of the later thirteenth century. This volume completes the critical edition of his academic works and presents his last two questions De divinis praedicamentis and his three annexed questions on the will (De potentia et actu volendi). These questions, deriving from disputations James held as Augustinian regent maste...

Epicureanism is not only a defence of pleasure: it is also a philosophy of science and knowledge. This edited collection explores new pathways for the study of Epicurean scientific thought, a hitherto still understudied domain, and engages systematically and critically with existing theories. It shows that the philosophy of Epicurus and his heirs, from antiquity to the classical age, founded a rigorous and coherent conception of knowledge. This first part of a two-volume set examines more spe...

This book examines the place of physical bodies, a major topic of natural philosophy that has occupied philosophers since antiquity. Aristotle’s conceptions of place (topos) and the void (kenon), as expounded in the Physics, were systematically repudiated by John Philoponus (ca. 485-570) in his philosophical commentary on that work. The primary philosophical concern of the present study is the in-depth investigation of the concept of place established by Philoponus, putting forward the clai...

In medieval and early modern natural philosophy, very few issues were as controversial as the nature of the elements. From the thirteenth up until the sixteenth century, European thinkers discussed this problem with growing interest. Defining the nature of the elements was key to deciphering the very structure of the universe and the essence of things. Along with five primary texts, here edited for the first time, this book discusses one of the most original contributions to this debate, that...

Articles 56–59 of Henry of Ghent’s Summa is devoted to the trinitarian properties. Henry was the most important Christian theological thinker in the last quarter of the 13th century and his works were influential not only in his lifetime, but also in the following century and into the Renaissance.

Henry’s Quaestiones ordinariae (Summa), articles 56–59 deal with the trinitarian properties and relations, topics of Henry’s lectures at the university in Paris. In these articles, dated a...

This volume is the first complete critical edition of Peter of Auvergne’s Questiones super I-VII libros Politicorum. The Questiones was produced at the Faculty of Arts of Paris sometime between late 1291 and 1296 and is the earliest surviving commentary in question form on Aristotle’s Politics. As the introduction explains, the Questiones was philosophically innovative and became the most influential question-commentary on the Politics in the Middle Ages. The volume also includes a critic...

Epicurean philosophy is a philosophy of knowledge, nature and pleasure. The second part of a two-volume set, this edited collection examines the core areas of Epicureanism : physiology, epistemology and ethics. The study is carried out from multiple perspectives: the reconstruction and analysis of primary sources, an examination of the debates and controversies surrounding the school of Epicurus, and a review of the reception of Epicurean philosophy. By challenging the widespread stereotype o...

Although the Jesuit Francisco Suarez (1548-1617) is one of the most important figures of late scholasticism, his work has not received the attention it deserves in English-speaking scholarly literature. One exception to this generalization is found in the work of the American scholar John P. Doyle, whose ground-breaking studies of several important areas of Suarez's complex but highly original system of thought have helped to make the Jesuit's ideas accessible to several generations of histor...

The history of logic and its development during the medieval period.

Radulphus Brito's Quaestiones super Priora Analytica Aristotelis is a major work written in the early 1300s which treated Aristotle's text devoted to the theory of the syllogism. Brito, perhaps one of the most influential medieval thinkers known as the Modistae, examines both categorical and hypothetical syllogisms. In his text, based on six known manuscripts which are complete or nearly complete, Brito was critical of many ...