In Studies on Early Modern Aristotelianism Paul Richard Blum shows that Aristotle’s thought remained the touchstone of modern philosophy; for it was the philosophy taught at universities. The concept of philosophy at Jesuit schools forms the first part of this book. Their impact on the sciences and mathematics in combination with Renaissance ideas of nature is the topic of the second part. The transformation of Aristotelian metaphysics and theology under the influence of the Renaissance is the third area of (...) this book. Surprising continuity from the late Middle Ages into modernity and the radical difference of subject centered modern philosophy from ‘teachable’ school philosophy are innovative in these studies. (shrink)

Inhalt: Descartes und das scholastische Argumentieren - Scholastik und Humanismus im Bildungsprogramm der Jesuiten - Nikolaus Cusanus - Marsilio Ficino - Giordano Bruno - Studienordnung und Philosophiebegriff: die Ratio studiorum SJ - Der ...

"Die eigentliche Optik Paul Richard Blums sollte man akkurat als holistisch bezeichnen. Es handelt sich um ein verborgenes Streben nach Ganzheitlichkeit, das diesem Buch eine methodologische Einheit gibt. ... Ein Mensch zu sein nach dem Zeitalter der Renaissance und Moderne ... bedeutet die Aufgabe, sich in einer strukturellen und inhaltlichen Offenheit zu situieren, die die verschiedenen Antworten auf die Frage: Was heißt es, ein Mensch zu sein? in der paradoxen Einheit eines neuen Humanismus zusammenbringt. ... Genau wie die Philosophie (...) des 20. Jahrhunderts ... das Fragen selbst ins Zentrum des Denkens stellte, so versucht Blum, Peter Wust folgend, das Prinzip insecuritas als Herzstück seiner Philosophie zu definieren." Balázs Mezei (Budapest). (shrink)

Elisabeth Blum and Paul Richard Blum, both Loyola University Maryland, jointly published: Giordano Bruno: Spaccio della bestia trionfante / Austreibung des triumphierenden Tieres, a translation form the Italian into German with introduction and extensive commentary at Meiner Verlag in Hamburg (Germany) 2009. ISBN: 978-3-7873-1805-6.

This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library applies critical thinking concepts to the unique requirements of engineering. Students and professionals across the field of engineering will find their analytical abilities enhanced by the engaging authoritative framework of inquiry set forth by Richard Paul and Linda Elder.

As a companion to How to Read a Paragraph, this volume in the Thinker’s Guide Library helps students develop clear, effective and meaningful written communication skills using critical thinking tools. If you want your students to develop well reasoned papers, and improve their overall reasoning abilities, this guide is a must.

Wonder, miracle, occult science, poetry, and the epistemological implications in Renaissance authors: Marsilio Ficino, Giovanni Pico, Pietro Pomponazzi, Agrippa of Nettesheim, Giordano Bruno, Francesco Patrizi, Tommaso Campanella, Francisco Suárez.

Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) was a philosopher in his own right. However, he was famous through the centuries due to his execution as a heretic. His pronouncements against teachings of the Catholic Church, his defence of the cosmology of Nicholas Copernicus, and his provocative personality, all this made him a paradigmatic figure of modernity. Bruno’s way of philosophizing is not looking for outright solutions but rather for the depth of the problems; he knows his predecessors and their strategies as well as (...) their weaknesses, which he exposes satirically. This introduction helps to identify the original thought of Bruno who proudly said about himself: “Philosophy is my profession!” His major achievements concern the creativity of the human mind studied through the theory of memory, the infinity of the world, and the discovery of atomism for modernity. He never held a permanent office within or without the academic world. Therefore, the way of thinking of this “Knight Errant of Philosophy” will be presented along the stations of his journey through Western Europe. (shrink)

I explicate and defend a non-standard theory of persistence, which I calltransdurantism. In short, transdurantism is the view is that objects persist by being temporally extended simples. Transdurantism is sometime misrepresented as a version of endurantism. Other times, transdurantism is misrepresented as a version of perdurantism. But I argue transdurantism must be disambiguated from perdurantism and endurantism—when endurantism, perdurantism, and transdurantism are properly construed, transdurantism stands apart from the other theories of persistence and we can better understand the distinct burdens (...) they each bear. I also argue that the transdurantist is capable of handling several key problems found in the persistence literature at least as well as her rivals, but she does face her own unique challenges. (shrink)

This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library uncovers current well-intentioned educational trends that inefficiently fragment energy and resources in our K-12 education systems. Critiquing the basic idea behind each of these fads illuminates their real motivations and provides for holistic use.

Translations: Giordano Bruno Teaches Aristotle. Nordhausen (Bautz) 2016 (Studia Classica et Medievalia 12) ) Giordano Bruno lettore di Aristotele. Ricezione e critica. Lugano (Agorà) 2016 (Novae Insulae: Testi e storia della filosofia 3) .

Nicholas of Cusa (1402-1464) explored the boundaries of human reason for the sake of making religious belief believable. Unwillingly, he became a milestone in the process of rationalizing Christian theology. Giordano Bruno (1548-1600) is a proof to this perspective by the way he makes use of Cusanus’s approach. In his ’Spaccio de la bestia trionfante’, Bruno discusses Cusanus’s attempts at the geometrical problem of squaring the circle. Bruno not only promotes his atomistic geometry, he also uses the metaphoric meaning of (...) triangle for Trinity as an occasion to supplant ’faith’ with ’sincerity’. For Bruno faith is not anymore the true belief of religion, but rather ’good faith’ and fidelity, i.e., social and political virtues. (shrink)

Contents: Preface; From faith to reason for fideism: Raymond Lull, Raimundus Sabundus and Michel de Montaigne; Nicholas of Cusa and Pythagorean theology; Giordano Bruno's philosophy of religion; Coluccio Salutati: hermeneutics of humanity; Humanism applied to language, logic and religion: Lorenzo Valla; Georgios Gemistos Plethon: from paganism to Christianity and back; Marsilio Ficino's philosophical theology; Giovanni Pico against popular Platonism; Tommaso Campanella: God makes sense in the world; Francisco Suárez – scholastic and Platonic ideas of God; Epilogue: conflicting truth claims; Bibliography; (...) Index. (shrink)

This popular pocket-size guide empowers readers with critical thinking tools based on the groundbreaking work of Richard Paul and Linda Elder. This bestselling volume in the Thinker’s Guide Library provides students, educators, and professionals with an authoritative problem-solving framework essential for every aspect of life.

Giordano Bruno was a philosopher in his own right. However, he was famous through the centuries due to his execution as a heretic. His pronouncements against teachings of the Catholic Church, his defence of the cosmology of Nicholas Copernicus, and his provocative personality, all this made him a paradigmatic figure of modernity. Bruno’s way of philosophizing is not looking for outright solutions but rather for the depth of the problems; he knows his predecessors and their strategies as well as their (...) weaknesses, which he exposes satirically. This introduction helps to identify the original thought of Bruno who proudly said about himself: “Philosophy is my profession!” His major achievements concern the creativity of the human mind studied through the theory of memory, the infinity of the world, and the discovery of atomism for modernity. He never held a permanent office within or without the academic world. Therefore, the way of thinking of this “Knight Errant of Philosophy” will be presented along the stations of his journey through Western Europe. (shrink)

I argue that David Lewis’s philosophically dominant conception of time travel cannot straightforwardly handle what we might call cases of relativistic time travel—that is, the sort of time travel which could only plausibly occur in a relativistic setting. I evaluate whether or not the Lewisian account can be successfully adapted such that it would able to analyse potential cases of relativistic time travel satisfactorily while still being employable in the analysis of those cases that make no mention of physics or (...) the structure of spacetime. This is primarily an analytical and explanatory exercise, rather than a polemical one. (shrink)

This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library employs critical thinking concepts in the development of productive scientific thought. Readers will learn to reason within the logic of their scientific disciplines and will find their analytical abilities enhanced by the engaging framework of inquiry set forth by Richard Paul and Linda Elder.

This volume of the Thinker’s Guide Library introduces readers to powerful methods for questioning that pinpoint underlying beliefs and systems of logic. Richard Paul and Linda Elder show how practical and accessible the Socratic method of inquiry can be and how useful it is when assessing and solving any problem.

Teaching Critical Thinking in the "Strong" Sense: A Focus On Self-Deception, World Views, and a Dialectical Mode of Analysis.

Giordano Bruno Giordano Bruno was an Italian philosopher of the later Renaissance whose writings encompassed the ongoing traditions, intentions, and achievements of his times and transmitted them into early modernity. Taking up the medieval practice of the art of memory and of formal logic, he focused on the creativity of the human mind. Bruno … Continue reading Giordano Bruno →.

The famous controversy between Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola is known to regard the proper use of Platonism in humanist and Christian context. With special attention to Pico’s Commentary on a Canzone, the point of disagreement with Ficino, which is not at all obvious, is examined through a close reading. The result is that Pico sees the temptation of a pantheistic and anthropocentric understanding of the relationship between the human realm and God. Whereas Ficino engaged in making pagan (...) philosophy amenable to Christian theology, Pico was concerned with upholding the otherness of the divine. For the humanist agenda, Ficino made plausible that the human world is divinized, while Pico called for the ascent to God. In Pico’s view the Neoplatonists secularized the divine, as was evident in Ficino’s philosophical theology. (shrink)

In popular lay discourse, objections to human biological enhancement technologies are sometimes expressed in terms of the charge that they are unnatural. This paper critiques the literal claim that seems to be presented here, namely that such technologies are in some ordinary sense ’unnatural' and that it follows from this they are immoral. Such a conceptual ’nature argument' is unsound. However, the paper contends that this does not mean that the charge of unnaturalness should be dismissed out of hand. Rather, (...) the charge of unnaturalness made by a non-philosophically trained public can be construed as expressive of a general attitude of conservative concern about enhancement technologies. Viewed in this way, the charge invites philosophers to take seriously the underlying empirical concerns that underpin these widespread lay reactions. (shrink)

This guide promotes simultaneous teaching of creative and critical thinking and explores them as innately interrelated essential elements of learning. As part of the Thinker’s Guide Library, it is a useful resource for teachers and administrators at every level, especially as they integrate critical and creating thinking into existing curricula.

The era of the Baroque witnessed a fierce debate over the interpretation of some experiments about the vacuum. It was riddled with fear of annihilation. My focus will not lie on the development of...

Transcententals such as 'being', 'one', 'good', and 'something' are part and parcel of the medieval heritage in Aristotelian philosophy. Since transcendentals must be predicated of every particular thing, they are essential both to argumentation and to metaphysics, specifically to the theory of Platonic Forms. Lorenzo Valla (1407-1457) hence concluded that 'thing' (res) is the only transcendental, distinct from metaphysical universality that applies to God exclusively. Marsilio Ficino (1433-1499) in drawing upon Platonism as entailed in the metaphysics of universals and in (...) theology argued that 'one' must be the transcendental that precedes 'being' – at least in God. Related to that was his epistemological claim (which became popular in Cartesianism) that cognition of external reality is controlled by internal ideas, which in Platonic terms originate in God's ideas. Therefore it seemed logical to Tommaso Campanella (1568-1639) to infer that the first three transcendentals (being, true, good) produce the tri-une God in such a way that these refer to all other properties of things (epistemologically and ontologically). Those approaches were known to Francisco Suárez (1548-1617) who endeavored to keep the semantic and the ontological meaning of transcendentals combined by interpreting Platonic Forms as principles of understanding and of creation. In doing so he developed teachings of Thomas Aquinas. – The Jesuit Suárez is known as a leading Aristotelian of the Second Scholasticism. In this chapter his metaphysics is portrayed as an appropriation and a critique of Renaissance Platonism. (shrink)

This paper is a review of the book "Philosophie des Humanismus und der Renaissance (1350–1600)" by Thomas Leinkauf.

"Philosophieren in der Renaissance" - das Thema dieses Bandes ist zugleich bescheiden und voraussetzungsreich. Zwar kann der Autor bei weitem keine "Geschichte der Philosophie der Renaissance" versprechen, er beansprucht aber zeigen zu konnen, was in der Epoche der Renaissance zu philosophieren bedeutet hat. Dabei sollen zentrale Themen des Renaissance-Denkens zur Sprache kommen: Wurde des Menschen, Freiheit des Individuums, Mensch und Welt, Religionsfreiheit, Humanismus, Natur, Naturliche Theologie, Vernunft. Unter diesem Themenspektrum setzt sich Blum auch mit dem Problem der Aktualisierung sowie Instrumentalisierung (...) historischen Denkens auseinander. Besonderes Augenmerk gilt der Philosophie der Zeit nach dem 16. Jahrhundert mit ihrer schon in der Renaissance entstandenen Schulphilosophie, werden doch hier die Bindeglieder zum Mittelalter und zur Neuzeit sichtbar. (shrink)