Medieval Discussions Of The Eternity Of The World

In the first work Boethius offers a purely philosophical discussion of man's highest good and, in the course of doing this, presents the life of the philosopher as the highest kind of life. In the second treatise, he considers in detail an issue which was much contested by Christian thinkers of his day: Can philosophical reasoning prove that the world began to be? Or does it rather show that the world is eternal, i.e. that it did not begin to be? In the third he offers a highly naturalistic explanation of dreams. Only within carefully defined limits will he acknowledge that dreams can give us any kind of knowledge of future events.

This volume examines the changing perceptions of time in the transition from the medieval debate to early modern philosophy. Some of the foremost contemporary experts try to weave the various strands of the topic into a methodological and doctrinal whole. The book consists of 21 studies (19 in English, 2 in French) subdivided into five main sections, entitled respectively The Late Antique Legacy, The Scholastic Debate, Late Scholasticism, Time and Medicine, Early Modern Philosophy. Themes discussed include the reception of Aristotle’s doctrine of time, the Augustinian and Neoplatonic heritage, the concepts of divine eternity and angelic duration, and the particular role attributed to time in medieval and early modern medicine. This collection of studies aims at offering a comprehensive historico-doctrinal analysis of one of the most fascinating topics in western intellectual history.

"The translation of Aristotle's philosophical works into Latin in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries produced a crisis for Christian thinkers insofar as the Aristotelian writing seemed to offer demonstrative proof that the world has always existed without a beginning at some point finitely distant in the past. The present volume offers the reader three different responses to the Aristotelian doctrine of the eternity of the world: the radical Aristotelian views of Siger of Brabant contrasted with those of St. Thomas Aquinas and St. Bonaventure. The latter two both held creation in time, though Aquinas believed that the question could only be decided on the basis of revelation, while Bonaventure argued that creation in time could be proved by reason."--

The first Argument, which survives in Arabic, is also included and makes this the only complete edition of On the Eternity of the World since antiquity.".

This volume makes available to scholars the texts, with critical apparatus, of a series of medieval works on the eternity of the world, extending from the 1220s to about 1315. Most of these are published here for the first time, and they present a wide range of views on one of the major issues of scholastic thought.

This volume examines the approaches of Fakhr-al-Dīn al-Rāzī (d. 1209) and Thomas Aquinas (d. 1274) to the question of the eternity of the world, which was one of the most heated issues of debate between theologians and philosophers in the Middle Ages. The first chapter of the book gives some background to the discussion from Greek philosophy, early Judaeo-Christian and Muslim traditions. The second and the third chapters discuss the approaches of Rāzī and Aquinas respectively to the question of the eternity of the world. The last chapter compares their approaches, brings out some similarities of their approaches between them as well as in relation to their own traditions, Islam and Christianity respectively. The book tries to show that though they were theologians, both Rāzī and Aquinas were more in line with the philosophers than their fellow theologians.

This exhaustive study of medieval Islamic and Jewish proofs for eternity, creation, and the existence of God classifies the proofs systematically, analyses and explains them, and traces their sources in Greek philosophy. Davidson pursues the penetration of some of these Islamic and Jewish arguments into medieval Christian philosophy and, in a few instances, all the way into seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European philosophy. He attempts to treat every medieval Arabic and Hebrew proof for eternity, creation, and the existence of God which has philosophical character, disregarding only those that rest entirely on religious faith or fall below a minimum level of plausibility. Unique in both its classification of the proofs and its comprehensiveness, this will serve historians of philosophy, historians of ideas, and medievalists.

The central debate of natural theology among medieval Muslims and Jews concerned whether or not the world was eternal. Opinions divided sharply on this issue because the outcome bore directly on God's relationship with the world: eternity implies a deity bereft of will, while a world with a beginning leads to the contrasting picture of a deity possessed of will. In this exhaustive study of medieval Islamic and Jewish arguments for eternity, creation, and the existence of God, Herbert Davidson provides a systematic classification of the proofs, analyzes and explains them, and traces their sources in Greek philosophy. Throughout the study, Davidson tries to take into account every argument of a philosophical character, disregarding only those arguments that rest entirely on religious faith or which fall below a minimal level of plausibility.

This study forms part of a research programme aiming to interpret and evaluate the theology of Thomas Aquinas and the later reception of his theology. In particular, it deals with the reception of Aquinas' thinking about the eternity of the world by theologians at the end of the 13th and the beginning of the 14th century. De Grijs defends the thesis that Aquinas' main interest in De Aeternitate Mundi is not philosophical but theological; while Aertsen opposes this thesis and tries to demonstrate Aquinas' philosophical purposes by comparing his De Aeternitate Mundi with his De Potentia and by study of his concept of creation. Van Veldhuijsen sketches the difference between Aquinas and Bonaventure in this respect. M. Hoenen concentrates on the importance of William de la Mare's Correctorium fratris Thomae and of the Correctoria Corruptorii for our understanding of the history of the reception of the views of Aquinas. F. Thijssen discusses the criticism of the Oxford theologian Henry of Harclay (died 1317) of Aquinas' views on two central issues that are involved in an eternal world: the traversal of an infinity and the existence of unequal infinities. Van Veldhuijsen, finally investigates Aquinas' reception by Richard of Middleton.