We were student-athletes at the University of Oregon. We were the next generation of young athletes to come through the football program. We wanted to leave our legacy here- yet chaos was lurking. I could remember that day vividly, we stood over that bridge, confiding in one another- what was supposed to be a summertime tradition quickly turned into something much more. Only God knows why. Full of youthfulness, friendship, and football. This story is a testament of the struggles we face, a...

The conventional opposition of scholastic Aristotelianism and humanistic science has been increasingly questioned in recent years, and in these articles William Wallace aims to demonstrate that a progressive Aristotelianism in fact provided the foundation for Galileo's scientific discoveries. The first series of articles supply much of the documentary evidence that has led the author to the sources for Galileo's early notebooks: they show how Galileo, while teaching or preparing to teach a...

The unifying theme in this second volume of essays by William A. Wallace to be published in the Variorum series is signaled in the title of the opening paper: 'Domingo de Soto and the Iberian roots of Galileo's science'. The seven essays in the first part provide textual studies of Soto's early formulations of the laws of falling bodies, the context in which they were developed in the 16th century, and the ways in which they were transmitted in Spain and Portugal to the early 17th century,...

"In 1611, Kepler wrote an essay wondering why snowflakes always had perfect, sixfold symmetry. It's a simple enough question, but one that no one had ever asked before and one that couldn't actually be answered for another three centuries. Still, in trying to work out an answer, Kepler raised some fascinating questions about physics, math, and biology, and now you can watch in wonder as a great scientific genius unleashes the full force of his intellect on a seemingly trivial question, com...

In this book, Fulton Sheen addresses what G. K. Chesterton called �the most tremendous question in the world; perhaps the only question in the world:� how man, through the power of reason, can know the nature of God. Tracing the course of philosophy from the Middle Ages to modern times, he shows Thomistic realism to be an adequate response to modern ideals. Emphasizing reason as a way of attaining knowledge of God, Bishop Sheen identifies the current age of agnosticism with its simultaneou...

How we create and organize knowledge is the theme of this major achievement by Umberto Eco. Demonstrating once again his inimitable ability to bridge ancient, medieval, and modern modes of thought, he offers here a brilliant illustration of his longstanding argument that problems of interpretation can be solved only in historical context.

This is a partial translation by Wade Baskin of the original French work Ecrits et Paroles (a 3 volume set, 665 pages) published between 1957 and 1959 by Henri Bergson.It includes the translation from Bergson's introduction to a French ed. of De rerum natura, by Lucretius published in 1884 under the title: Extraits de Lucre`ce.

The third book of Lucretius' great poem on the workings of the universe is devoted entirely to expounding the implications of Epicurus' dictum that death does not matter, 'is nothing to us'. The soul is not immortal: it no more exists after the dissolution of the body than it had done before its birth. Only if this fact is accepted can men rid themselves of irrational fears and achieve the state of ataraxia, freedom from mental disturbance, on which the Epicurean definition of pleasure was...

In Baroque Science, Ofer Gal and Raz Chen-Morris present a radically new perspective on the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. Instead of celebrating the triumph of reason and rationality, they study the paradoxes and anxieties that stemmed from the New Science and the intellectual compromises that shaped it and enabled its spectacular success.Gal and Chen-Morris show how the protagonists of the new mathematical natural philosophy grasped at the very far and...

The ideal of balance and its association with what is ordered, just, and healthful remained unchanged throughout the medieval period. The central place allotted to balance in the workings of nature and society also remained unchanged. What changed within the culture of scholasticism, between approximately 1280 and 1360, was the emergence of a greatly expanded sense of what balance is and can be. In this groundbreaking history of balance, Joel Kaye reveals that this new sense of balance and...

Joseph Bobik offers a translation of Aquinas’s De Principiis Naturae (circa 1252) and De Mixtione Elementorum (1273) accompanied by a continuous commentary, followed by two essays: “Elements in the Composition of Physical Substances” and “The Elements in Aquinas and the Elements Today.” The Principles of Nature introduces the reader to the basic Aristotelian principles such as matter and form, the four causes so fundamental to Aquinas’s philosophy. On Mixture...

Duhem's 1908 essay questions the relation between physical theory and metaphysics and, more specifically, between astronomy and physics–an issue still of importance today. He critiques the answers given by Greek thought, Arabic science, medieval Christian scholasticism, and, finally, the astronomers of the Renaissance.