Cette thèse présente les réponses données à la question du fondement du possible et de l’impossible dans la scolastique jésuite espagnole de l’époque moderne : en vertu de quels critères jugeons-nous que telle chose ou tel événement sont possibles, alors que tels autres nous paraissent impossibles ou contradictoires ? La double nature de ce travail, philosophique et historique, s’incarne dès lors en deux volumes à la fois distincts et complémentaires. Le premier volume est consacré à l’analyse philosophique des différentes réponses apportées au problème du possible, entre les premiers pas académiques de la Compagnie de Jésus espagnole jusqu’à son expulsion définitive du royaume en 1767. Après quelques préliminaires généraux sur le développement institutionnel et doctrinal de la scolastique moderne, on y présente successivement les solutions des écoles dominicaine et franciscaine espagnoles du XVIe siècle avant de passer aux différents grands modèles jésuites : les synthèses de Gabriel Vázquez et Francisco Suárez ; l’émergence d’un courant ultra-essentialiste ; la critique inspirée par le nominalisme de Pedro Hurtado de Mendoza ; le développement d’une ontologie conditionnaliste par Juan de Lugo et ses nombreux élèves ; la critique néo-augustinienne de toutes les traditions antérieures par Antonio Pérez et ses nombreux élèves ; le développement d’une ontologie des états de choses par Sebastián Izquierdo ; et enfin le développement d’une série d’autres solutions marginales à la fin du XVIIe siècle. Le travail se clôture sur l’expulsion d’Espagne de la Compagnie de Jésus en 1767 et par quelques réflexions sur la « migration » de ces problématiques vers l’Europe Centrale. Le second volume est quant à lui purement historique et textuel. Il propose l’édition de différents textes, tirés d’ouvrages imprimés anciens ou bien de manuscrits inédits, rédigés par vingt des principaux auteurs engagés dans la querelle des possibles, à savoir, dans l’ordre chronologique : F. Albertini, P. Hurtado de Mendoza, J. de Lugo, R. de Arriaga, Th. Compton Carleton, A. Pérez, F. de Oviedo, M. de Elizalde, T. González de Santalla, T. Muniesa, S. Mauro, S. Izquierdo, G. de Ribadeneira, I.F. Peinado, J. de Sousa, A. Sémery, J. de Campoverde, E. Láriz, Á. Cienfuegos et J. Rufo. Chaque édition de texte est précédée d’une biographie intellectuelle retraçant les principales étapes de la carrière de l’auteur, avec des indications sur ses maîtres, collègues et disciples, ainsi que sur le contexte institutionnel de son enseignement. L’ensemble est précédé d’une étude sur les rapports entre les cours imprimés et manuscrits dans la tradition scolastique moderne. Un troisième et court volume se compose d’un bref « who’s who » scolastique ainsi que d’une bibliographie générale, reprenant toutes les sources primaires et secondaires utilisées.

This Thesis deals with the philosophy and ethics of St.Thomas Aquinas and of St. Augustine. At first I characterize the time period then I am focusing on each cathegory concerning moral life of human being in the world such as God, soul, will, goodness, evil and happiness as well. My goal is to show the real purpose of human existence and to show how both philosophers understand individual topics, what is the same and different in their opinion.

The syllabus in natural philosophy and mathematics was radically changed in the course of the sixteenth century with new subjects, textbooks and methods introduced. Education became more practical and less dependent on medieval antecedents. Printing technology improved textbooks and made it possible to replace them with newer versions. Following sweeping syllabus reform around 1500, the Cambridge Master of Arts course was heavily slanted towards humanism. The old scholastic textbooks were rejected and replaced with modern authors. The purpose of natural philosophy was explicitly to illuminate the providential work of the creator, especially through natural history (a newly developing subject in the sixteenth century thanks to newly translated and promulgated Greek texts) where examples of God's work were there for all to see. Oxford remained wedded to scholastic texts although the trivium was reformed along humanistic lines. Cromwell's visitors in 1535 outlawed scholasticism by decree but gave little indication of the alternative (their white list stipulating only Aristotle). The solution adopted by the Oxford masters was to import the Cambridge syllabus and textbooks wholesale. When the evangelical regime of Edward VI reformed the universities in 1549, the humanist natural philosophy syllabus was adjudged appropriate, especially those parts promoted by Philip Melanchthon at the University of Wittenberg. However, the visitors' background at court meant they valued ethics and politics more highly. The Reformation itself left natural philosophy largely unaffected although the barrier preventing Catholics from entering clerical careers after 1558 appears to have encouraged some to remain philosophers. In mathematics, the 1549 visitation was highly significant. Cambridge University's initiative in 1500 in employing a university lecturer in the subject was in danger of stagnating due to inappropriate appointments. However, John Cheke's statutes in 1549 promoted the use of modern textbooks of practical arithmetic, finance and surveying useful to the centralised Tudor state. He also introduced the new subject of geography as a result of his contacts at court with merchants and explorers. The thesis concludes that during the second half of the sixteenth century,English students could expect a mathematical and philosophical education comparable to that of their Italian peers. This was sufficient to provide graduates with the knowledge they needed to carry these subjects forward in the seventeenth century.

Habilitationsschrift--Salzburg. / Bibliography: p. [xvii]-xxiv.

This dissertation explores the development of the concept of synderesis between 1150 and 1450. In medieval moral psychology, synderesis referred to the innate capacity of the mind to know the first principles of natural law, or, alternatively, the will to follow these principles. But it was also interpreted as a mystical power of the soul, capable of uniting it to God. synderesis also appears in Late Medieval vernacular literature, as a character in moralising texts. By approaching synderesis from the point of view of conceptual history I synthesise these fields and explore how synderesis operated beyond the formal treatises of scholastic theology. Chapter two explores how synderesis developed in medieval scholasticism from Peter Lombard up to Thomas Aquinas. Chapters three and four explore how the mystical interpretation of synderesis first proposed by Thomas Gallus of Vercelli was incorporated into the mystical treatise Itinerarium mentis in Deum by Bonaventure of Balneoregio. Here, I analyse when, where and how Bonaventure integrated this mystical interpretation into his pre-existing moral-psychological interpretation of it and how his use of synderesis relates to the historical context in which the Itinerarium was written. I argue that synderesis should be seen as existing on a continuum of interpretations between moral psychology and mysticism. After Bonaventure and Aquinas, the concept undergoes a period of stagnation in academia, which is the subject of Chapter five. However, synderesis also appears in a number of non-academic texts in which the moral-psychological and mystical interpretations of the term coexist. Chapter six explores how Late Medieval vernacular authors drew on previous scholastic discussions of the concept. I focus here in particular on Guillaume de Deguileville's Le pèlerinage de l'âme, where synderesis appears not as the moral guide of the soul, but as the accuser of the soul before the court of heaven.

No description available.

This thesis submits Luigi Giussani’s theological writings to philosophical analysis. Giussani (born in Desio, 1922; died in Milan, 2005) was a prominent Italian author, public intellectual, university lecturer, and founder of the international Catholic lay movement Communion and Liberation (CL). My enquiry is motivated by the experience of readers who find Giussani’s texts marked by vagueness and seeming inconsistencies despite his attempt to respond decisively and sensitively to real human problems. It also presents ideas from those works available only in Italian to an English-language readership for the first time. Rather than criticize the author’s style of exposition, or restate his arguments in a manner more suited to my audience, I treat the texts’ burdens as symptomatic of the author’s deeper, unarticulated concerns. I reconstruct Giussani’s implicit concerns using history, intellectual biography, sources, and the logic of enquiry itself. I then re-read his texts in the light of the explicit rendering of those concerns and, where the texts’ burdens still persist, I suggest repairs corresponding to those concerns and to the errant behaviours his writings were generated to correct. Three themes are examined: judgement, freedom, and beauty. These were prominent in Giussani’s dialogue with students from the 1950s onward and integral to his idea of the religious education of youth. My analysis is conceived as a contribution to philosophical theology, rather than to the philosophy of education. The areas flagged for repair, however, may nonetheless serve educators. I conclude that Giussani’s account is indeed shaped by his implicit concerns; that their nature provokes the essentialist arguments he mounts; and that his attempt to expound intrinsic, universal, and timeless claims runs against the pragmatic thrust of his writing. My repairs call for a better account of 1) practical deliberation, 2) discursive reason, 3) obedience in relation to autonomy, and 4) habits related to the formation of virtues. I argue that the practical grounds of his project are best anchored in robust solutions to the problems of ordinary life formulated from the deepest sources of repair from Giussani’s tradition (sacred scripture and sacred tradition, including the liturgy) rather than what he calls the “needs and exigencies of the heart,” which address a different problem (namely Enlightenment rationality or Neo-Thomism).

Zugl.: Wien, Univ., Diss., 2004 u.d.T.: Gangl, Peter: "Vetera novis augere et perficere"

Jean Bréhal est un dominicain normand, docteur en théologie, qui s’est fait un nom en tant qu’inquisiteur du royaume de France, non pas en traquant l’hérésie, ou en poursuivant des sorcières, mais en annulant des condamnations, et plus particulièrement celle de la Pucelle d’Orléans, vingt-cinq ans après le bûcher de Rouen. Sa longévité dans l’officio inquisitionis (de 1452 à 1474), sous les règnes de Charles VII et de Louis XI, contraste avec le nombre réduit d’affaires qu’il a instruites, d’après les sources. Aussi on peut se demander s’il fait figure d’exception, ou s’il est inquisiteur exemplaire de la fin du Moyen Âge. Le «cas Bréhal» invite à examiner la charge d’inquisiteur après le Concile de Vienne, dans le contexte particulier, à la fois d’un territoire encore marqué par les antagonismes de la guerre de Cent ans, et d’une Église éprouvée par le Grand Schisme et ses séquelles. Sur la base d’un corpus composé principalement des écrits du dominicain, dont certains éléments sont des manuscrits inédits, mais dont le noyau est constitué par la procédure en nullité de la condamnation de Jeanne d’Arc, cette thèse se propose non seulement d’appréhender l’homme et son parcours, mais aussi et surtout sa pensée, d’analyser son écriture scolastique, de saisir le sens de son action, percer ses motivations, et peut-être comprendre la nature du «pouvoir» qu’il a incarné pendant plusieurs décennies. Au final, c’est une époque, des milieux, et la situation d’un office, que cette étude centrée sur Jean Bréhal éclaire, tout autant que la spécificité d’un individu. Elle a surtout pour but de faire connaître une œuvre qui embrasse des champs variés et des centres d’intérêts divers. / Jean Bréhal is a Dominican friar from Normandy and a theology professor, who became renowned as an inquisitor in the kingdom of France, neither for tracking down heresy nor pursuing witches, but for quashing sentences, more especially the sentence of condemnation of the Maid of Orléans, twenty five years after she was burnt at the stake in Rouen. The longevity of his tenure in the officium inquisitionis (from 1452 until 1474), in the reigns of Charles VII and Louis XI, contrasts with how few investigations he actually conducted, according to the documentation. So we wonder whether he was an exception or exemplary for the late Middle Ages. The “Bréhal case” suggests looking upon the office of inquisitor after the Council of Vienne, in the particular context of a territory that was still scarred by the divisions of the Hundred Years’ war, and of a Church that had been tested by the Great Schism and its aftermaths. Our corpus mostly consists of the Dominican’s own writings, of which some documents are unpublished manuscripts, and its core lies in the trial of nullification of the condemnation of Joan of Arc. On that basis, the aim of this thesis is to know not only the man and his journey but also, and above all, his thinking, to parse his scholastic prose, to grasp the meaning of his action, to discover his motivation, and to understand the nature of the “power” that he has embodied over several decades. Eventually, this study, while focusing on Jean Bréhal, sheds light as much on a time, a world and the state of an office, as on the specificities of one individual. Above all, its goal is to introduce readers to a body of works that contains various fields and interests.

This thesis demonstrates the importance of scholastic philosophy and natural law to the theory of religious uniformity and toleration in Seventeenth-Century England. Some of the most influential apologetic tracts produced by the Church of England, including Richard Hooker's Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Robert Sanderson's Ten lectures on humane conscience and Samuel Parker A discourse of ecclesiastical politie are examined and are shown to belong to a common Anglican tradition which emphasized aspects of scholastic natural law theory in order to refute pleas for ceremonial diversity and liberty of conscience. The relationship of these ideas to those of Hobbes and Locke are also explored. Studies of Seventeenth-Century ideas about conformity and toleration have often stressed the reverence people showed the individual conscience, and the weight they attributed to the examples of the magistrates of Israel and Judah. Yet arguments for and against uniformity and toleration might instead resolve themselves into disputes about the role of natural law within society, or the power of human laws over the conscience. In this the debate about religious uniformity could acquire a very philosophical and sometimes theological tone. Important but technical questions about moral obligation, metaphysics and theology are demonstrated to have played an important role in shaping perceptions of magisterial power over religion. These ideas are traced back to their roots in scholastic philosophy and the Summa of Aquinas. Scholastic theories about conscience, law, the virtues, human action and the distinction between nature and grace are shown to have animated certain of the Church's more influential apologists and their dissenting opponents. The kind of discourse surrounding toleration and liberty of conscience is thus shown to be very different than sometimes supposed. Perceptions of civil and ecclesiastical power were governed by a set of ideas and concerns that have hitherto not featured prominently in the literature about the development of religious toleration.