Rory Fox challenges the traditional understanding that Thomas Aquinas believed that God exists outside of time. His study investigates the work of several mid-thirteenth century writers providing a wealth of material on medieval concepts of time and eternity.

Introduction : creating paradise -- ch. 1. The body in Eden. Creating bodies ; Bodily functions ; The pleasures of paradise ; Being fruitful and multiplying ; The children of Eden ; What Adam knew ; Creating souls ; Eden as human habitat -- ch. 2. Power in paradise. Dominion over the animals ; Domestic dominion : the origins of economics ; Power and gender ; Unequal men : the origins of politics ; Power and possession : the origins of ownership ; The insubordinate fall -- ch. 3. Death and the paradise beyond. The death of the animal ; The body returns ; Representing paradise : from Eden to the patria ; Perfecting children's bodies ; Rewarding inequality ; Negotiating the material ; Resurrecting the senses ; Somewhere over the rainbow -- Coda : between paradises.

This volume evaluates Thomas Bradwardine's view of time as a mathematical, philosophical and theological concept within the context of ancient and medieval discussions of the problem of time. The book begins with an historiographical analysis of Bradwardine's mathematical and theological works, followed by an examination of the problem of time in classical, early medieval and thirteenth-century texts. Next, a series of chapters surveys Bradwardine's view of time as it related to proportionality, contingency, continuity and predestination. A final chapter establishes Bradwardine's place among fourteenth-century natural philosophers and theologians. As it uses a wide range of Bradwardine's writings, this book is able to show how Bradwardine's philosophical and theological views converged. This study is especially useful for historians of late medieval science, philosophy and theology.

This Handbook shows the links between medieval and contemporary philosophy. Topic-based essays on all areas of philosophy explore this relationship and introduce the main themes of medieval philosophy. They are preceded by the fullest chronological survey now available of the different traditions: Latin and Greek, Islamic and Jewish.

This volume presents an introduction to Aquinas and a guide to his thinking on almost all the major topics on which he wrote. The book begins with an account of Aquinas's life and the historical context of his thought. The subsequent sections address topics that Aquinas himself discussed. The final sections of the volume address the development of Aquinas's thought and its historical influence.

Time plays many crucial roles in Descartes’ physics, metaphysics, and epistemology, but has been an understudied area of his philosophy. Rebecca Lloyd Waller argues for a new interpretation of Descartes’ account of time in light of the views held by his major predecessors. By studying Descartes’ account of time through its historical context, Lloyd Waller contends that Descartes’ views are actually consistent, comprehensive, and more historically significant than has been recognized. Descartes offers a type of temporal dualism composed of intrinsic duration and an innate idea of time-in-thought. Lloyd Waller's explanation of Descartes' time-in-thought is also the key to resolve many significant problems in the contemporary literature. Given both its historical sensitivity and its ability to directly engage and address common interpretive puzzles, Descartes' temporal Dualism offers a significant contribution to the understanding of an important, but frequently neglected component of Descartes’ ontology.

Inspiration and Authority in the Middle Ages rethinks the role of prophecy in the Middle Ages by examining how professional theologians responded to new assertions of divine inspiration. Drawing on fresh archival research and detailed study of unpublished manuscript sources from the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, this volume argues that the task of defining prophetic authority became a crucial intellectual and cultural enterprise as university-trained theologians confronted prophetic claims from lay mystics, radical Franciscans, and other unprecedented visionaries. In the process, these theologians redescribed their own activities as prophetic by locating inspiration not in special predictions or ecstatic visions but in natural forms of understanding and in the daily work of ecclesiastical teaching and ministry. Instead of containing the spread of prophetic privilege, however, scholastic assessments of prophecy from Peter Lombard and Thomas Aquinas to Peter John Olivi and Nicholas Trevet opened space for claims of divine insight to proliferate beyond the control of theologians. By the turn of the fourteenth century, secular Italian humanists could lay claim to prophetic authority on the basis of their intellectual powers and literary practices. From Hugh of St Victor to Albertino Mussato, reflections on and debates over prophecy reveal medieval clerics, scholars, and reformers reshaping the contours of religious authority, the boundaries of sanctity and sacred texts, and the relationship of tradition to the new voices of the Late Middle Ages.