Zugl.: Aachen, Techn. Hochsch., Diss.

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This thesis offers an account of William of Ockham's understanding of teleology in order to question the standard modernist history of the concept. Ockham does not rely on the Aristotelian analogy between art and nature to establish that all natural things seek an end. Nor does he simply relativize the analogy by considering all creatures as having their ends fixed by God. Instead, Ockham draws a sharp distinction between voluntary and natural agency, which results in two very different uses of final causality. On the one hand, the way in which final causes operate in voluntary agents cannot compromise their freedom. On the other hand, the way they operate in natural agents cannot explain their necessity. Ockham negotiates the radical difference between the causality of voluntary and natural agents by positing a new analogy altogether, comparing it to the difference between will and intellect.

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In the early centuries of Christianity every Christian writer even from New Testament times attempted in his own way to come to terms with the apparent opposition inherent in the confrontation of Christianity and classical thought. The inspired word of God in Sacred Scripture revealed to man the way, the truth and the life of his salvation, to which he had no access except through this revelation which was to be gained only through faith. What need, then, was there that man possessing this faith should turn to pagan thought? Speculation, no matter how deeply concerned with the quest for truth, could add nothing to what God had already revealed. [...]

Filarete's treatise presents architecture, the new archaized mode of building, to Francesco Sforza as the means to historiate and recuperate his insurgent regime, which had overturned the preceding dynastic order of power. This thesis shows how the treatise tried to persuade a powerful but retardatory new prince not yet absorbed by the legitimizing narrative of a renascence of antiquity. It focuses on the treatise's narrative, and places it in its political situation, to show that Filarete made a dramatic, polemical opposition between building and architecture, which he will be shown to have defined as those techniques of assuring the arche.

The study of patristic quotations of the Greek New Testament has proven valuable in the field of textual criticism as a means of locating variant readings both chronologically and geographically, facilitating the reconstruction of the development of the different textual groups. This thesis will document the Pauline citations, adaptations and allusions of Didymus of Alexandria, and then determine their textual affinities, along the lines of earlier studies in this field. Using the methodology developed by B. Ehrman, including both a statistical analysis and a method of group profiling, this study concludes that the text of Paul in Didymus clearly belongs to the Alexandrian group. An appendix giving suggestions for corrections and additions to the critical apparatuses of both the 27th edition of the Nestle-Aland text and the 4th edition of the United Bible Societies text of the Greek New Testament has also been provided.

The Neoplatonist philosopher Porphyry of Tyre (ca.232-305 A.D.) wrote Against the Christians, a fifteen-volume treatise targeting Christianity. Porphyry's attack was considered so scandalous that it was twice condemned to flames by Roman emperors. It is thus only in the works of Christian apologists that Against the Christians is extant, i.e. in a fragmentary state. The topic of this study is the twelfth book of Porphyry's treatise, the best known and probably the most challenging to Christians. Indeed, it deals with the Book of Daniel, which underlies a great part of Christianity's foundations as it allegedly foretells both Parousiai. It will first be demonstrated that the writing of the treatise can be dated to the 290s, which indicates it was not an immediate threat to Christians facing the Great Persecution (303-311). Then recent methodological approaches are presented in order to get a better insight of the content of Against the Christians. It is established that Porphyry wrote a detailed exegesis of Daniel with the intention of criticizing the Christian literal interpretation of the Scriptures by adapting history to prophecy. Finally it is suggested that Porphyry wrote his treatise in response to a Christian allegorical exegetical tradition of Daniel.

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