Thomas Aquinas is the most widely read and arguably most influential of the medieval philosophers. He is famous for his impressive and coherent synthesis of Greek Philosophy and Christian Theology and his magisterial Summa Theologiae is a hugely important, and enduring, text in the history of philosophy. Yet he is also a very difficult thinker and his ideas present a number of challenges to his readers.Aquinas: A Guide for the Perplexed is a clear and thorough acc...

This book is no less than a guide to the whole of Western philosophy -- the ideas that have undergirded our civilization for two-and-a-half thousand years. Anthony Kenny tells the story of philosophy from ancient Greece through the Middle Ages and the Enlightenment into the modern world. He introduces us to the great thinkers and their ideas, starting with Plato, Aristotle, and the other founders of Western thought. In the second part of the book he takes us through a thousand years of med...

"His book...supplant[s] all others, even the immensely successful History of Western Philosophy by Bertrand Russell."—A. C. GraylingAlready a classic, this landmark study of early Western thought now appears in a new edition with expanded coverage of the Middle Ages. This landmark study of Western thought takes a fresh look at the writings of the great thinkers of classic philosophy and questions many pieces of conventional wisdom. The book invites compari...

Sir Anthony Kenny continues his magisterial new history of Western philosophy with a fascinating guide through more than a millennium of thought from 400 AD onwards, charting the story of philosophy from the founders of Christian and Islamic thought through to the Renaissance.The middle ages saw a great flourishing of philosophy, and the intellectual endeavour of the era reaches its climax in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, with the systems of the great schoolmen such as Thomas Aq...

"Because of the importance of Averroes (as a Muslim he is significant for both Platonic and Islamic thought), it is good to have Lerner's new and thoughtful interpretation, with lucid introduction, three helpful appendixes, glossary, and index."—Library Journal"This is a fine translation of a very difficult and important text, lost in its Arabic original but preserved in the awkward fourteenth-century Hebrew translation of Judah ben Samuel. Even in this summary form, the Republic i...

In this classic work, Frederick C. Copleston, S.J., outlines the development of philosophical reflection in Christian, Islamic, and Jewish thought from the ancient world to the late medieval period. A History of Medieval Philosophy is an invaluable general introduction that also includes longer treatments of such leading thinkers as Aquinas, Scotus, and Ockham.

Gender scholarship during the last four decades has shown that the exclusion of women's voices and perspectives has diminished academic disciplines in important ways. Traditional scholarship in philosophy is no different. The 'recovery project' in philosophy is engaged in re-discovering the names, lives, texts, and perspectives of women philosophers from the 6th Century BCE to the present. Karen Warren brings together 16 colleagues for a unique, groundbreaking study of Western philosophy w...

Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (22 January 1729 15 February 1781) was a German writer, philosopher, dramatist, publicist, and art critic, and one of the most outstanding representatives of the Enlightenment era. His plays and theoretical writings substantially influenced the development of German literature. He is widely considered by theatre historians to be the first dramaturg. Lessing was a poet, philosopher and critic. His theoretical and critical writings are remarkable for their often witty ...

In Uncommon Sense, Andrew Pessin leads us on an entertaining tour of philosophy, explaining the pivotal moments when the greatest minds solved some of the knottiest conundrums—by asserting some very strange things. But the great philosophers don’t merely make unusual claims, they offer powerful arguments for those claims that you can’t easily dismiss. And these arguments suggest that the world is much stranger than you could have imagined:You neither will, nor won't, do certain thin...

Alfarabi was among the first to explore the tensions between the philosophy of classical Greece and that of Islam, as well as of religion generally. His writings, extraordinary in their breadth and deep learning, have had a profound impact on Islamic and Jewish philosophy. This volume presents four of Alfarabi's most important texts, making his political thought available to classicists, medievalists, and scholars of religion and Byzantine and Middle Eastern studies.

Are there any universal entities? Or is the world populated only by particular things? The problem of universals is one of the most fascinating and enduring topics in the history of metaphysics, with roots in ancient and medieval philosophy. This collection of new essays provides an innovative overview of the contemporary debate on universals. Rather than focusing exclusively on the traditional opposition between realism and nominalism, the contributors explore the complexity of the debate...

How was the world generated and how does matter continue to be ordered so that the world can continue functioning? Questions like these have existed as long as humanity has been capable of rational thought. In antiquity, Plato's Timaeus introduced the concept of the Demiurge, or Craftsman-god, to answer them. This lucid and wide-ranging book argues that the concept of the Demiurge was highly influential on the many discussions operating in Middle Platonist, Gnostic, Hermetic and Christian ...