Preliminary Material -- INTRODUCTION -- CHAPTER ONE: THE LEGACY FROM ANTIQUITY -- CHAPTER TWO: ERIUGENA AND HIS FOLLOWERS -- CHAPTER THREE: THE SECOND QUARTER OF THE TWELFTH CENTURY -- CHAPTER FOUR: EXOTIC VIEWS -- CHAPTER FIVE: THE EARLY THIRTEENTH CENTURY -- CHAPTER SIX: THE DECADE OF THE 1250S -- CHAPTER SEVEN: THE DEVELOPMENT OF THE CONTROVERSY -- CHAPTER EIGHT: THE CONDEMNATION OF 1270 AND ITS AFTERMATH -- CHAPTER NINE: THE CLIMAX OF THE CONTROVERSY -- CHAPTER TEN: THE AFTERMATH OF THE CONDEMNATION -- CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY: OXFORD -- CHAPTER TWELVE: THE EARLY FOURTEENTH CENTURY: PARIS -- EPILOGUE -- SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY -- INDEX OF NAMES -- SUBJECT INDEX.

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.

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 editors of this volume have collected a large number of texts, most of them previously available only in manuscript, of a wide range of scholastic views on the problem of the eternity of the world. These selections range from William of Durham in the 1220s to John of Jandun in 1315. They illustrate the continuity of medieval discussions of this crucial topic and present the major arguments on all sides of the question. Several of the authors are anonymous, and many of those whose names are known have been little studied. The notes not only identify the fontes but also, through extensive cross references, show the obligations of these authors to each other. Indices of authorities, names, and biblical citations enhance the book's usefulness for the scholar of medieval thought.

"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.".